How To Store And Access Array Data From Laravel's .env File

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Setting a List
• Conclusion

Introduction

In Laravel, configuration settings are typically managed using the .env file, which stores key-value pairs that define the behavior of the application. This format works well for most configuration settings. But what if you need to assign a list of values to a single key?

Setting a List

Let's consider a scenario where you need to whitelist multiple domains for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) [↗] access in your application.

Step 1: Define the List in .env

To whitelist the domains for CORS, you can list them under a single key in your .env file:

.env Entry
✅ Wrap📋
01: ALLOWED_DOMAINS=http://example.com,https://subdomain.example.com,http://localhost:3000

Here, ALLOWED_DOMAINS is the key, and the list of domains separated by commas represents the values.

Step 2: Accessing the List in Your Code

In your application code, you can retrieve and use this list of domains by splitting the string into an array:

Code Implementation
✅ Wrap📋
01: <?php
02: 
03: $allowedDomains = explode(',', env('ALLOWED_DOMAINS'));

The explode function in PHP splits the string based on the delimiter (, in this case) and returns an array containing each domain.

Conclusion

Laravel also provides an in-built configurations [↗] option beyond .env files.

This allows you to further organize and manage settings by creating a PHP file within a dedicated config directory.

Here is another article you might like 😊 Creating A Browser-based Interactive Terminal (Using XtermJS And NodeJS)