Problem of environment files with inter-apis calls laravel - php

Question

Good morning, everyone,
As part of the development of demonstration APIs, I realized two APIs :
HelloWorld
Notify
The first one allows to ask for a HelloWorld to be performed, the second one allows to send e-mails according to defined templates.
In my demonstration I make from Postman (or from a React application) an API call to HelloWorld which then makes an API call to Notifier to send the message.
If from Postman I call directly my Notifier API to send an email, I do not encounter any problem (the .env file is well configured for sending emails in this API).
On the other hand if I call my API from HelloWorld to Notifier (the .env file of HelloWorld is not configured for sending e-mails), I encounter an error:
Expected response code 250 but got code "530", with message "530 5.7.1
Authentication required
On the other hand if I configure the .env file of the HelloWorld API (which does not send an e-mail at any time), I do not have any more error and my e-mail is well sent by Notifier.
This is the API Call in HelloWorld :
$client = new Client();
$response = $client->post("http://vhost-url.local/api/notifier/sendmail", [
'json' => [
'to' => $to,
'template' => $template,
'parameters' => $parameters
],
]);
And this is the action called in Notifier API :
public function sendmail(Request $request)
{
$params = json_decode($request->getContent(), true);
try{
switch ($params['template']) {
case 'HELLO_WORLD':
Mail::to($params['to'])
->send(new HelloWorld([
'message' => $params['parameters']['message']
]));
break;
default:
throw new \Exception("Ce template n'existe pas");
break;
}
} catch(\Exception $e) {
return response()
->json([
'message' => $e->getMessage(),
], 500);
}
return response()
->json([
'message' => 'Le mail a bien été envoyé'
], 200);
}
My question is: During an API call (with Guzzle in my case), is the environment file of the source API used instead of the environment file of the destination API? And if so, how to fix this problem?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this helps but I have had similar problems. The .env files get messed up when cross-communicating Laravel projects (on Windows only I believe).
See for instance https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/19454 .
The solution is to run php artisan config:cache to create a cached version of your .env variables. Note that you should never use env('...') in your code, instead you should refer to them using a config file like config('app.env'). .env variables can not be dynamic for this reason.
For custom env variables, I usually create a config/project.php file like so:
return [
'my_custom_var' => env('PROJECT_MY_CUSTOM_VAR')
];
That way you can cache it and call the variable using config('project.my_custom_var');