How to overwrite .env file variables in laravel - php

Question

I am making a custome cms, I want admin users to be able to modify some variable from GUI (Admin seting) like mail variables. So they can easily change some values in the enviroment file by using the provided update form.
I made a custom function in a helper file i created and added the following code to it
function changeEnv($key, $value)
{
$path = base_path('.env');
if (file_exists($path)) {
file_put_contents($path, str_replace(
$key . '=' . env($key), $key . '=' . $value, file_get_contents($path)
));
}
}
Then in my controller I have the following code
public function updateEmail(Request $request)
{
foreach ($request->types as $key => $type) {
// echo $type . "=" . $request[$type];
changeEnv($type, $request[$type]);
}
}
Now when i hit the update button, only viriables with NULL get updated and not completely, I will get something like MAIL_PORT=465null After this they will no longer update unless i changed it manually to null.
My env variables looks like below befor update:
MAIL_MAILER=mail
MAIL_HOST=mailhog
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="hello#example.com"
MAIL_FROM_NAME="${APP_NAME}"
And After updating it I will get:
MAIL_MAILER=mail
MAIL_HOST=mailhog
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=sslnull
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="hello#example.com"
MAIL_FROM_NAME="${APP_NAME}"
I will appreciate any help on how to make this work perfectly.

Answer 1

Do not modify the .env directly, because this will cause several troubles (as #apokryfos mentioned in the comment). Troubles include caching and manual changes to this file.
Use the appropriate built-in functions to modify the configuration. To set configuration values at runtime, pass an array to the config function: config([key => value]). See https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/configuration#accessing-configuration-values
Furthermore you may want to consider the following architectures:
Store the configuration in a database table. So you can easily deal with advanced functionality, like user action logging, concurrency control and storing additional informations. Use a service provider that loads the config values from the database table into the Laravel config on boot. Of course this may be an overkill, if your CMS is designed for single or small teams only.
Write your manageable configuration into a custom configuration file, which is placed in the config/ directory and may overwrites all of the other default confiuguration values. The advantage would be that Laravel can deal with it as it is used to be and you benefit from things like caching.
Caching
Always ensure to reset the configuration cache after changing the configuration. You can do this programmatically. See https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/artisan#programmatically-executing-commands
Example:
Artisan::call('cache:clear')