How to set production environment variables on heroku?

Question

I want to run an app using MySQL on heroku. I have already installed and configured cleardb for this purpose. All I have left to do is configure environment variables. However, I can't find a proper way to do this.

in this article, Matt explains how to configure the mentioned variables:

// config/database.php

$url = parse_url(getenv("CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL"));

$host = $url["host"];
$username = $url["user"];
$password = $url["pass"];
$database = substr($url["path"], 1);

// . . .

'mysql' => array(
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => $host,
    'database'  => $database,
    'username'  => $username,
    'password'  => $password,
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix'    => '',
),

And he also says:

if you're actually working on a real site, you should be making sure you're just editing the database credentials specifically for your production environment

So, how exactly should environment variables be configured in production to run MySQL using cleardb on heroku?

Answer 1

Being tagged as Laravel 5.2, you need to set the environment variable in the .env file. This file is not included in version control, because you are supposed to have different versions on each installation. A .env.example is provided by default.

As an example, if your URL is:

CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL => mysql://adffdadf2341:adf4234@us-cdbr-east.cleardb.com/heroku_db?reconnect=true

then in your .env file you can put:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=us-cdbr-east.cleardb.com
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=heroku_db
DB_USERNAME=adffdadf2341
DB_PASSWORD=adf4234

and leave the config/database.php untouched.

The other solution would be to define the URL above in the .env file and parse it dynamically as suggested. Note that these variables are accessed using env("CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL").

EDIT

Since the CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL is set automatically, it will probably be better to make use of it.

// config/database.php

if ($url = env('CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL', false)) {
    $parts = parse_url($url);
    $host = $parts["host"];
    $username = $parts["user"];
    $password = $parts["pass"];
    $database = substr($parts["path"], 1);
} else {
    $host = env('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
    $username = env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge');
    $password = env('DB_PASSWORD', '');
    $database = env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge');
}

// ...
        'mysql' => [
            'driver' => 'mysql',
            'host' => $host,
            'database' => $database,
            'username' => $username,
            'password' => $password,
            'charset' => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix' => '',
        ],