Skip to main content

Laravel refusing to start up

I'm very much a fan of the clean implementation of Laravel but really dislike the fact that if there is something wrong with the .env file it refuses to give any meaningful information.

Laravel uses the vlucas/phpdotenv package to manage its environment.

It's pretty well known that if you have a space on either side the = sign in a key value pair then the .env file is invalid, but I had checked for this (and checked again).

Laravel will try to use its standard logging methods before they have actually had a chance to be booted up with the result that you're left with a "reflection error" exception message on the CLI rather than the actual cause of the problem in the dotenv package.

Debugging this is not trivial and I resorted to using strace to try and determine exactly what was going on.  Don't do this at home kids!  The easier solution is at the end of the article.

I used the following command to generate a trace of the system calls being made by PHP while trying (and failing) to run artisan optimize.

 strace php artisan optimize &> /tmp/strace.txt  

That let me walk through the calls and eventually confirm that the first PHP exception was thrown in the package that deals with reading the environment file.

 access("/var/www/raffle.bhf.org.uk.new/vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Dotenv.php", F_OK) = 0  
 ... more lines loading up more of the package and showing us processing it ....  
 access("/var/www/raffle.bhf.org.uk.new/vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Exception/InvalidFileException.php", F_OK) = 0  

But sadly there was no indication of exactly what the problem is with the file!

I decided that creating a minimal project dedicated to debugging my .env file was going to be faster than anything else.

I created a temporary directory and ran "composer require vlucas/phpdotenv".  Then I placed my faulty .env file into the directory and ran the following PHP file:

 <?php  
 require('vendor/autoload.php');  
 $dotenv = new Dotenv\Dotenv(__DIR__);  
 $dotenv->load();  

This gave me the actual exception in DotEnv which was that "Dotenv values containing spaces must be surrounded by quotes".  So it wasn't a space around the = sign but rather a space in one of my values, which made my life a lot easier!  As an extra bonus the first line in the stack showed exactly which key was problematic.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

Using Azure Active directory as an OAuth2 provider for Django

Azure Active Directory is a great product and is invaluable in the enterprise space. In this article we'll be setting it up to provide tokens for the OAuth2 client credentials grant. This authorization flow is useful when you want to authorize server-to-server communication that might not be on behalf of a user. This diagram, by Microsoft, shows the client credentials grant flow. From Microsoft documentation  The flow goes like this: The client sends a request to Azure AD for a token Azure AD verifies the attached authentication information and issues an access token The client calls the API with the access token. The API server is able to verify the validity of the token and therefore the identity of the client. The API responds to the client Setting up Azure AD as an OAuth2 identity provider The first step is to create applications in your AD for both your API server and the client. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to register the applications o...

"Word of the Day" PHP script (with word list)

I was looking around for a way to generate a word of the day on the web and didn't find anything. So I coded a quick and dirty script to do it. Just in case anybody does a Google search and manages to find my blog: here is my Word of the Day PHP script : Copy this code snippet into a wordoftheday.php file: $file = fopen("interesting_words.txt","r"); $raw_string = fread($file,filesize("interesting_words.txt")); fclose($file); $words_array = explode("|",$raw_string); echo $words_array[array_rand($words_array)]; Of course the real issue I had was finding a list of interesting words in the right format. Here is the list of interesting words that I used: Copy this into a file called interesting_words.txt : ubiquitous : being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent| ecdysiast : a striptease artist| eleemosynary : of, relating to, or dependent on charity| gregious : c...