Multiple environments require multiple .env files?

Your .env file is listed in the gitignore file by default. So you should be fine. If you are "copy and pasting" the entire folder over then it might be a problem.

I'm not worried about git.

My question aims for the concept behind this approach. So it's correct that I need two different .env files, right?

You shouldn't be using an env file in production.

What should I be using in production?

Hard coded in the various config files. https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv Edit:
phpdotenv is made for development environments, and generally should not be used in production.

That would make it hard to keep the sensitive data out of version control. Now I am worried about git.

Okay you are talking about development not production.

You are wrong @jldrw

OP: yes you must have multiple env files as these contain your crucial data. Just set it up first time and you usually don't have to care about it anymore as long as you ignore it from git.

To cite your own link @jlrdw

You should never store sensitive credentials in your code

@jlrdw Yes, like I said in my first post: How do I handle the different environments. What would be the solution to keep all the config data out of version control if they are hard coded all over multiple files?

@EmilMoe Actually @jldrw is not wrong. Having an .env file creates an massive overhead, every setting has to be looked up. The creator recommends to avoid using it in production. So who knows how @TaylorOtwell thinks this is supposed to be done.

I am getting the feeling that this .env approach is the wrong decision to handle this issue. It would be much better just to have a .php file with two arrays that contain the data for production and development. This way it would be extremely fast and could be kept out of version control.

Your time is better off working on something else than that overhead except if you site has many requests and you can actually see it's a problem.

Besides this all your answers are already listed on https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv

Maybe @JeffreyWay can say if it has an impact on his performance at Laracasts.com if he uses .env files. That would be an relevant example to measure against.

From the vlucas/phpdotenv docs:

phpdotenv is made for development environments, and generally should not be used in production. In production, the actual environment variables should be set so that there is no overhead of loading the .env file on each request. This can be achieved via an automated deployment process with tools like Vagrant, chef, or Puppet, or can be set manually with cloud hosts like Pagodabox and Heroku.

I haven't actually bothered with this as the performance impact is minimal but the recommended way is to set actual environment variables in your virtual hosts. This can be a pain without some sort of automated tool though. Easiest solution might be to use forge.

Can be achieved relatively easy if you do your own setup in Apache:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10902433/setting-environment-variables-for-accessing-in-php

<VirtualHost hostname:80>
   ...
   SetEnv VARIABLE_NAME variable_value
   ...
</VirtualHost>