John Davidson

Message:

I have just started a new Symfony 5 project (only worked on Symfony 3 before) and I am having a hard time to understand how values in .env and .env.local work together.

The Symfony docs say, that values in .env.local will override values from .env:

If you need to override an environment value (e.g. to a different
value on your local machine), you can do that in a .env.local file:

All machines I am working on use the same basic setup (same DB server, etc.) but some values are different (DB name, password, etc.). Thus I wanted to put the common configuration in .env and the device specific values in .env.local:

# .env

...

DB_SERVER="localhost"

DB_VERSION="10.4"



DB_USER=${DB_DBNAME}



DATABASE_URL="mysql://${DB_USER}:${DB_PASS}@${DB_SERVER}/${DB_DBNAME}?serverVersion=${DB_VERSION}"

# .env.local

DB_DBNAME="someDB"

DB_PASS="secretPW"

When using this setup I get an error and php bin/console debug:container --env-vars shows DATABASE_URL "mysql://:@localhost/?serverVersion=10.4". Obviously DATABASE_URL is build ignoring the values from .env.local.

I can easily solve this by moving DATABASE_URL="mysql://... to .env.local but is this the intended way of using .env and .env.local?

I thought values of these files are merged where .env.local values override .env values. Is this not the case? Or did I make some error?

---

My Answer:
In Symfony, the environment variables are typically defined in the .env file, which is loaded by default. The .env.local file is used to override values from the .env file for local development or machine-specific configurations. The order of precedence for environment variables is as follows:

1. .env.local - This file is used to override values from the .env file for local development or machine-specific configurations.
2. .env - This file contains the default environment variables for the project.
3. .env.test - This file is used for testing environments.
4. .env.prod - This file is used for production environments.

In your case, you can put the common configuration values in the .env file and the device-specific values in the .env.local file. The values in the .env.local file will override the values from the .env file when the application is running in a local environment.