[php] Reloading .env variables without restarting server (Laravel 5, shared hosting)

My Laravel 5 has run OK until the database was configured, then found this error:

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known

Doing some research it seems that I configured MySQL access too late, so I should restart the server in order to get the correct environment variables. Well, I'm using Dreamhost's shared server and I just can't do that.

How should I fix this issue?

Thanks

To be clear there are 4 types of caches you can clear depending upon your case.

php artisan cache:clear

You can run the above statement in your console when you wish to clear the application cache. What it does is that this statement clears all caches inside storage\framework\cache.

php artisan route:cache

This clears your route cache. So if you have added a new route or have changed a route controller or action you can use this one to reload the same.

php artisan config:cache 

This will clear the caching of the env file and reload it

php artisan view:clear 

This will clear the compiled view files of your application.

For Shared Hosting

Most of the shared hosting providers don't provide SSH access to the systems. In such a case you will need to create a route and call the following line as below:

Route::get('/clear-cache', function() {
    Artisan::call('cache:clear');
    return "All cache cleared";
});

I know this is old, but for local dev, this is what got things back to a production .env file:

rm bootstrap/cache/config.php

then

php artisan config:cache
php artisan config:clear
php artisan cache:clear

If you have run php artisan config:cache on your server, then your Laravel app could cache outdated config settings that you've put in the .env file.

Run php artisan config:clear to fix that.

In case anybody stumbles upon this question who cannot reload their webserver (long running console command like a queue runner) or needs to reload their .env file mid-request, i found a way to properly reload .env variables in laravel 5.

use Dotenv;
use InvalidArgumentException;

try {
    Dotenv::makeMutable();
    Dotenv::load(app()->environmentPath(), app()->environmentFile());
    Dotenv::makeImmutable();
} catch (InvalidArgumentException $e) {
    //
}

It's possible that your configuration variables are cached. Verify your config/app.php as well as your .env file then try

php artisan cache:clear

on the command line.

A short solution:

use Dotenv;

with(new Dotenv(app()->environmentPath(), app()->environmentFile()))->overload();
with(new LoadConfiguration())->bootstrap(app());

In my case I needed to re-establish database connection after altering .env programmatically, but it didn't work , If you get into this trouble try this

app('db')->purge($connection->getName()); 

after reloading .env , that's because Laravel App could have accessed the default connection before and the \Illuminate\Database\DatabaseManager needs to re-read config parameters.