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Etienne Noël
Etienne Noël

Reputation: 6166

Does Symfony 4 load the environment variables on every request in the "prod" environment?

Does Symfony 4 somehow save or cache the environment variable parameters in the "prod" environment or does it retrieve them on every request?

My problem is that when I host my Symfony application using Apache, I need to list all the environment variables by defining them all in the VirtualHost configuration using SetEnv directives; and I would prefer not having to do that.

I would expect that when using the PHP CLI, I could "compile" the Symfony project by capturing or caching the parameters so that when the application is run through Apache, it uses these "cached" parameters.

Is it doable or the SetEnv approach is the only one?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2850

Answers (1)

yivi
yivi

Reputation: 47308

Symfony uses the DotEnv component to deal with environment variables.

The DotEnv component reads .env files and load its contents on environment variables.

  • If there is a .env file, this one is loaded first. If there is no .env, file, but a .env.dist file exists, this one is used in its place .
  • If a .env.local file exists, it is loaded now. This file should never be committed to a source code repository, and its values override those in the previous files
  • If an even more localized .env.$env.local exists (or if it doesn't but .env.$env exist), is loaded now. Again, these values override those that came before.

This will populate all the declared environment variables, but it won't override existing environment variables. There is performance hit from reading .env files, but hit is practically negligible.

That these are loaded depend on the bootstrap.php file, that is loaded by default on public/index.php and bin/console; so the approach serves both HTTP request and console applications, so you could use to store these values instead of using SetEnv directives in your Apache configuration.

But wait, there is more...

On top of the above, you can dump all these variables into a PHP-optimised file so that the .env files need not to be parsed on each request.

To do that, you simply execute:

composer dump-env prod

This will create a .env.local.php file. And if this file exists, none of the above will be read at all.

Upvotes: 2

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