Deploy to server - invalid cipher / key length

I'm trying to get my project to show on a server. I was trying to follow this guide which seems well known: https://medium.com/laravel-news/the-simple-guide-to-deploy-laravel-5-application-on-shared-hosting-1a8d0aee923e#.gity4dl56

When I go to the site , it says: RuntimeException in EncryptionServiceProvider.php line 45: No supported encrypter found. The cipher and / or key length are invalid.

I was wondering if I could get some advice on what things to check?

On this server, the files are supposed to be uploaded to a "htdocs" folder, so that's were I put it.

Since the contents of the "public" folder is moved to the root folder (as the guide suggests), I adjusted the paths in the index.php file to:

  require __DIR__.'/bootstrap/autoload.php';     

 $app = require_once __DIR__.'/bootstrap/app.php';

And the bootstrap/app.php has this line:

$app = new Illuminate\Foundation\Application(
    realpath(__DIR__.'/../')

The "storage" folder has these permissions: rwxr-xr-x.

In the .env file , it says APP_ENV=local , is that correct?

It has an APP_KEY with 32 characters

I set the DB_HOST to localhost, and I have added the database name , username and password.

In config/app.php, the cipher is set as: 'cipher' => 'AES-256-CBC',

How could I troubleshoot this?