[php] Laravel 5 How to switch from Production mode

When I run $ php artisan env I get;

Current application environment: production

How can I change this to development or something similar? So I can see errors.. I have read a lot of the documentation but it is not at all easy for a newbie to understand. I don't have server config experience, really.

I'm sure there is "smart" way to do this, but all I am interested in, for now, is manually changing the environment. How do I do this?

What you could also have a look at is the exposed method Application->loadEnvironmentFrom($file)

I needed one application to run on multiple subdomains. So in bootstrap/app.php I added something like:

$envFile = '.env';
// change $envFile conditionally here
$app->loadEnvironmentFrom($envFile);

Do not forget to run the command php artisan config:clear after you have made the changes to the .env file. Done this again php artisan env, which will return the correct version.

In Laravel the default environment is always production.

What you need to do is to specify correct hostname in bootstrap/start.php for your enviroments eg.:

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Detect The Application Environment
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Laravel takes a dead simple approach to your application environments
| so you can just specify a machine name for the host that matches a
| given environment, then we will automatically detect it for you.
|
*/

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
    'local' => array('homestead'),
    'profile_1' => array('hostname_for_profile_1')
));

Laravel 5 uses .env file to configure your app. .env should not be committed on your repository, like github or bitbucket. On your local environment your .env will look like the following:

# .env
APP_ENV=local

For your production server, you might have the following config:

# .env
APP_ENV=production