vlucas/phpdotenv

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

13550 stars · 663 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

PHP dotenv is a Composer library that loads environment variables from a `.env` file into `$_ENV`, `$_SERVER`, and optionally `getenv()`. It implements the twelve-factor app practice of keeping configuration such as credentials out of source code.

Use cases

• load environment variables from a .env file in php
• keep database credentials out of source code
• configure a php app per deployment environment
• avoid editing apache or nginx virtual hosts for config
• share required env values with a .env.example file

When to choose

• you build PHP applications and want twelve-factor style environment configuration
• you need the same env vars set across Apache, Nginx, CLI, and PHP's built-in server
• you want a battle-tested, widely adopted dotenv implementation for PHP

When to avoid

• your runtime already loads .env files natively
• you need secrets management with encryption or a vault rather than plain files
• you are not working in PHP

Facets

library · maturity stable

configuration-management developer-tools developer-tools web-development backend php cli dotenv environment-variables twelve-factor composer web-server

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