IMPORTANT: I've moved on to create a package to support cascading configuration in Laravel 5. This repo is only here for historical purpose, and will not be updated or monitored.

laravel-5-cascading-config

The cascading configuration system in Laravel 4 has been removed in L5 in favor of PHP dotenv, the PHP version of the original Ruby dotenv. This simple gist is to re-enable it (and the whole shining flexibility).

Setup

1. At the same level with your application's config directory, create another with the name config.{APP_ENV} with {APP_ENV} being the value set in .env.
2. In the new directory, place your corresponding environment config files and variables just like the good old days.
3. Overwrite app/Providers/ConfigServiceProvider.php, or at least its register() method, into your application.

Notes

Actually in Laravel 4, the config directory structure looks like this:

├── app
│   ├── commands
│   ├── config
│   │   ├── api.php
│   │   ├── app.php
│   │   ├── auth.php
│   │   ├── ...
│   │   ├── local
│   │   │   ├── api.php
│   │   │   ├── app.php
│   │   │   ├── ...

In Laravel 5 though, such a structure will trigger a fatal error. Basically L5 is not happy if you have two different files with the same name under its config directory. So I ended up with this workaround:

├── config
│   ├── api.php
│   ├── app.php
│   ├── auth.php
│   ├── ...
├── config.local
│   ├── app.php
│   └── auth.php

Not the best, but hey.

Credits

The initial idea is from Gnuffo1. I replaced array concatenation with array_replace_recursive to allow nested configuration, fixed said error, and set the repo up.