Environment check

A deploy goes fine, and a week later someone notices that APP_DEBUG has been on the whole time, or that APP_ENV still says local and the production mail driver never kicked in. The environment check mails you the next morning instead.

API_KEY_ALERT_ENVIRONMENT_CHECK=true

Set it in the .env of the server where the values must hold, usually production. The check runs with the daily check, at API_KEY_ALERT_CHECK_TIME (default 07:00), and needs the scheduler to run. It compares the live config with the expected values:

Setting	Expected
app.debug	false
app.env	production

Every daily check that still finds a wrong value mails again, so the reminder keeps coming until it is fixed. Once everything is right you get one more mail saying so. The mail names each setting with its actual and its expected value, and tells you to run php artisan config:clear after the fix.

Changing the expected values

Publish the config and edit environment.expected. Any config key works, and the comparison is strict:

'environment' => [
    'check' => (bool) env('API_KEY_ALERT_ENVIRONMENT_CHECK', false),
    'expected' => [
        'app.debug' => false,
        'app.env' => 'production',
        'mail.default' => 'ses',
    ],
],

Keep the list short. Every extra key is one more thing that differs on staging, and the check only helps while you trust it.

Running it by hand

php artisan api-key-alert:check environment
php artisan api-key-alert:status

The first runs the check now, also when API_KEY_ALERT_ENVIRONMENT_CHECK is off. The second shows whether the environment is currently reported as wrong, without a check.

What it does not catch

The switch lives in .env, so a server whose whole .env is replaced by a .env.example loses the switch together with the right values, and the check stays silent. The package does not guess whether a server is production; that guess would be wrong exactly when you need it. If that is a risk in your deploy, keep the switch in the deploy template too.

In code

The check is a service called environment, so everything that works for a key works here too: ApiKeyAlert::isFailing('environment'), ApiKeyAlert::failure('environment'), the ApiKeyFailed and ApiKeyRecovered events, and the Slack recipe in Recipes. The mails are EnvironmentFailedMail and EnvironmentRecoveredMail, in English and Dutch, and publishable like the others. ApiKeyAlert::checkEnvironment() runs the comparison and returns a CheckResult.