Laravel Layered Environment

Laravel Layered Environment allows your Laravel application to load environment variables from multiple .env files.

Instead of maintaining a single .env file for every environment, you can split your environment configuration across multiple files and let Laravel merge them together according to a predictable precedence order.

Why?

Laravel applications commonly use a single .env file containing environment-specific configuration.

As an application grows, this can become inconvenient. Some values are shared between environments and should be committed to version control, while other values are specific to a developer, server, or deployment and should remain outside the repository.

Laravel Layered Environment introduces a simple convention for separating these values:

.env
.env.override

.env.testing
.env.testing.override

.env.production
.env.production.override

This allows you to keep non-sensitive defaults in version control while storing sensitive or machine-specific values in an uncommitted override file.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+
• Laravel 13.x

Installation

Install the package via Composer:

composer require buismaarten/laravel-layered-environment

After installing the package, register the package's environment loader in bootstrap/app.php.

<?php

use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;

$app = Application::configure(basePath: dirname(__DIR__))
    // ...
    ->create();

$app->singleton(
    Illuminate\Foundation\Bootstrap\LoadEnvironmentVariables::class,
    LaravelLayeredEnvironment\LoadEnvironmentVariables::class,
);

return $app;

That's all that is required to enable layered environment files.

Usage

Laravel Layered Environment follows Laravel's normal environment variable handling. You can continue using env() and config() exactly as you normally would.

For example, given the following files:

.env
.env.override
.env.production
.env.production.override

the application will load them as layers.

Environment files

The base .env file contains the default values for the application:

APP_NAME="My Application"
APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false

CACHE_STORE=database
QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

The environment-specific .env.production file can contain values that apply to all production deployments:

APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false

CACHE_STORE=redis
QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis

Finally, .env.production.override can contain values specific to a particular server or deployment:

APP_URL=https://example.com

REDIS_HOST=10.0.0.10
REDIS_PASSWORD=super-secret-password

When the application runs in the production environment, all three files are loaded in order.

Environment File Precedence

Environment files are loaded from least specific to most specific.

For a production application, the order is:

.env
  ↓
.env.override
  ↓
.env.production
  ↓
.env.production.override

If the same variable is defined in multiple files, the value from the file loaded last takes precedence.

For example:

# .env

APP_DEBUG=false
APP_NAME="My Application"

# .env.production

APP_DEBUG=true

# .env.production.override

APP_DEBUG=false

The resulting value is:

APP_DEBUG=false

This gives you a simple way to define defaults once and override them only where necessary.

Recommended .gitignore

Remove any existing .env-related entries from your .gitignore that would prevent shared environment files (such as .env, .env.testing, or .env.production) from being committed.

Add the following to your .gitignore to keep overrides and environment-specific overrides out of version control:

.env.override
.env.*.override

This allows the shared environment files to be committed while keeping local and deployment-specific overrides out of version control.

Never commit passwords, API keys, private keys, or other secrets to your repository. An override file being ignored by Git does not prevent it from being leaked through other means, so treat these files as sensitive.

Example Project Structure

A project using Laravel Layered Environment might look like this:

├── .env
├── .env.override
├── .env.testing
├── .env.testing.override
├── .env.production
├── .env.production.override
├── app/
├── bootstrap/
│   └── app.php
├── config/
├── resources/
└── ...

With the following files committed:

.env
.env.testing
.env.production

And the following files ignored:

.env.override
.env.testing.override
.env.production.override

This provides a clean separation between shared configuration and deployment-specific configuration.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see the LICENSE for more information.