You can parse an .env file as an .ini with PHP - but there's a catch (shkspr.mobi)

submitted 4 months ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to c/programming@programming.dev

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The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee. But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP's parse_ini_file() function and it works. But… .env and .ini have subtly different behaviour which …

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[-] bitfucker@programming.dev 0 points 4 months ago

Also I don't understand why we need to have a .env file in the first place when config file exists and best practice to pass on secret is not with .env file anyway.

this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026

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