Artisan unable to access environment variables from $_ENV - php

Question

Any artisan command I enter into the command line throws this error:
$ php artisan
<?
return array(
'DB_HOSTNAME' => 'localhost',
'DB_USERNAME' => 'root',
'DB_NAME' => 'pc_booking',
'DB_PASSWORD' => 'secret',
);
PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/martin/code/www/pc_backend/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Config/EnvironmentVariables.php on line 35
{"error":{"type":"ErrorException","message":"Undefined index: DB_HOSTNAME","file":"\/home\/martin\/code\/www\/pc_backend\/app\/config\/database.php","line":57}}
This is only on my local development system, where I recently installed apache and php. On my production system on a shared host artisan commands work just fine. The prod system has it's own .env.php, but other than that the code should be identical.
Relevant files:
.env.local.php
<?
return array(
'DB_HOSTNAME' => 'localhost',
'DB_USERNAME' => 'root',
'DB_NAME' => 'pc_booking',
'DB_PASSWORD' => 'secret',
);
app/config/database.php
<?php
return array(
'fetch' => PDO::FETCH_CLASS,
'default' => 'mysql',
'connections' => array(
'mysql' => array(
'driver' => 'mysql',
'host' => $_ENV['DB_HOSTNAME'],
'database' => $_ENV['DB_NAME'],
'username' => $_ENV['DB_USERNAME'],
'password' => $_ENV['DB_PASSWORD'],
'charset' => 'utf8',
'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
'prefix' => '',
),
),
'migrations' => 'migrations',
),
);
The $_ENV array is populated as expected on the website - the problem appears to be with artisan only.

Answer 1

So I finally figured out how to fix it.
It turns out that the file was not processed as a php file because I was using a short opening tag in the .env.local.php file. Using a normal opening tag solved it. I don't know why though, as short tags work fine elsewhere.