Create .env.example with Artisan

A task I often forget when developing Laravel Applications is updating .env.example. So I created a quick command to do that for me. Of course you could add this also to your CI pipeline, but ever so often a simple command like this is good enough.

The result of this you can view in the Github Repository or you simply add the package to your project via composer:

composer require --dev kuvvu/envexample

There are also some configuration options available:

<?php

return [

    /* Create a copy/backup of current env.example at start */

    'create_bakup' => false,
    'backup_file_name' => 'env.example.bak',

    /* All keys in this array will not be cleared upon copying to .env.example */

    'keep' => [
        'APP_NAME',
        'DB_CONNECTION',
        'DB_PORT',
        'MAIL_MAILER',
        'MAIL_HOST',
        'MAIL_PORT',
        'MAIL_ENCRYPTION',
        'MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS',
        'MAIL_FROM_NAME',
        'LOG_CHANNEL',
        'LOG_DEPRECATIONS_CHANNEL',
        'LOG_LEVEL',
        'BROADCAST_DRIVER',
        'CACHE_DRIVER',
        'FILESYSTEM_DISK',
        'QUEUE_CONNECTION',
        'SESSION_DRIVER',
        'SESSION_LIFETIME',
        'AWS_DEFAULT_REGION',
        'AWS_USE_PATH_STYLE_ENDPOINT',
        'AWS_URL',
        'AWS_ENDPOINT',
        'MEMCACHED_HOST',
        'REDIS_HOST',
        'REDIS_PORT',
    ],

    /* All keys in this array will not be copyied to .env.example */

    'ignore' => [],

];

To use this you need to publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=env-example

Updating the .env.example file then is as simple as:

php artisan make:env.example