Update: How to Get Environment in Laravel 5
Your PHP application should have different settings for its development and production environments. Here’s how you can set your Laravel 4 app to detect the environment, load the appropriate settings and keep installation-specific things like database credentials out of your Git repo.
Detecting The Environment
Laravel lets you provide arrays of hostnames it will check the server against to determine the environment.
Open bootstrap/start.php
$env = $app->detectEnvironment([ 'local' => ['MyMachineName', 'AnotherDevMachine'], 'staging' => ['StagingEnvName'] ]);
If unsure, use PHP’s gethostname() function to find your machine names.
This is the value to use inside the local/staging arrays
Laravel will default to ‘production’ if no other environment is matched.
Setting Environment Config Values
Laravel looks for .env.*.php files in the root directory (beside your composer.json and .gitignore files).
You will want to exclude these files from your Git repo. Add the following lines to your .gitignore
.env.*.php .env.php
Then create an env file for each of your environments. Use .env.php for the production environment.
They should look something like this:
<?php /** * Local Development */ return array( 'app.env' => 'dev', 'app.debug' => true, 'app.url' => 'http://example.dev', 'mysql.host' => '127.0.0.1', 'mysql.database' => 'bestDbEva', 'mysql.username' => 'me', 'mysql.password' => 'myTremendousPassword' );
The actual values are up to you. You can store whatever values you need within the application.
Using The Environment Values
Laravel config can now call getenv() to get the dynamic environment variable. For your DB config open app/config/database.php
'mysql' => array(
'driver' => 'mysql',
'host' => getenv('mysql.host'),
'database' => getenv('mysql.database'),
'username' => getenv('mysql.username'),
'password' => getenv('mysql.password'),
'charset' => 'utf8',
'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
'prefix' => '',
),
By using a combination of CSS, HTML and web fonts you can almost always reproduce the same effect that you get by displaying information with an image. Not only will your content be crawlable, but it will also be able to be marked up with metadata, meaning your awesome header graphic could also be the H1. If it were an image that wouldn’t be the case. Furthermore if you create a graphic using this method as opposed to an image, editing it is a cinch. If you want to change the text, colour, size or any other styling, you don’t have to pull the graphic back into Photoshop to change.
Those minimalist highly visual, low word count designs might look great, but for SEO purposes they are incredibly counterproductive. Google needs content to work out what the website is about. Sure your metadata does some of the job but Google is a completionist and good copy indicates digestible information for the end user. Google’s algorithm is all about sending their users to results they can trust. If you want to retain the minimalist approach then the solution could be to hide the copy behind mouse-overs, however it may be worth questioning whether doing this pits aesthetics against usability.