artisan config:cache breaks app. It can't find credentials file referenced in .env

@wfsmith as in, show the code......

So you are putting a string into config which you then load and parse as a filepath?

Test:

Open tinker and type config('app.google_app_creds')

@Snapey yes that is correct. Google APIs generates a json file for authentication via a service account using their PHP SDK.

And I am storing the json in a folder on the root of the application called /credentials which is .gitignored. For deployment, you generate the json, place it in that folder on the server after composer install and everything runs fine until you run php artisan config:cache

@click Ah interesting. i updated my post since you reply. I was wrong. There is only one .env variable not being referenced using the config( syntax, and its for an artisan command.

@wfsmith what does "Then the application suddenly can't access the credentials json file and I get this error:" mean. Is it a console application, a queued job, a webpage?

And what is the value of config('app.google_app_creds') after you cached the config? Is it really empty if you debug it?

@click Its a website. An API specifically. I can explain further but essentially you can make a request to a /stories endpoint and if you include ?mostviewed=true, it will use Google API to fetch the top N stories from Google Analytics and pass back the stories that are the most viewed in the last 48 hours.

When I cache the config file, this endpoint /stories?mostviewed is a 500 and returns the error I mention in the original post. When I clear the config, the request is a 200 and it correctly returns the stories.

The .env variable in question is in config/app.php:

'google_app_creds' => ENV('GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS'),

And its only referenced once in the code in a custom ServiceProvider package where I initialize the Google client.

EDIT

Sorry, forgot your last question. Yes, the variable is correct in bootstrap/cache/config.php after running config:cache:

    'google_app_creds' => '/var/www/api.example.com/credentials/google/apis.json',
    'google_profile_id' => '1234567890',

@wfsmith I never worked with the google API but if you go to the link they suggest you to visit (https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/application-default-credentials#GAC) it says

You can use the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to provide the location of a credential JSON file.

This will not work with your environment variable and config caching as all the env() responses will be null, see laravel's documentation mentioned above.

If you google on the combination laravel GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS you will find more of the same questions and with solutions.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46397023/loading-google-application-credentials-in-laravel-5 shows a suggestion:

$storage = new StorageClient([
   'keyFilePath' => config('app. google_app_creds'),
]);

@click Thank you. While this solution didn't work, it set me on the right path.

it looks like this authentication approach cannot read environment variables at all even if using the Google\Cloud\StorageClient package:

$client->useApplicationDefaultCredentials();

But authenticating with $client->setAuthConfig(PATH_TO_JSON) is able to read the environment variable:

$client->setAuthConfig(config('app.google_app_creds'));

Here is the solution that worked for me:

function initializeGA()
{
  $client = new \Google\Client();
  try {
    $client->setAuthConfig(config('app.google_app_creds'));
    $client->setScopes(['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly']);
    return $client;
  }
  catch(\Exception $e) {
    return null;
  }
}

Seems so simple in retrospect. I don't know why the Google SDK doesn't work with both approaches. Dare I say its a bug in the SDK?

Thank you @click and @snapey for your help in solving this!