The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee.  But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP's parse_ini_file() function and it works.  But…  .env and .ini have subtly different behaviour which …

Terence Eden

PHP's built-in parse_ini_file() function can read .env files, but the two formats have subtle incompatibilities that cause silent data corruption. The .ini format uses semicolons for comments (not #), so inline # comments get included in values, semicolons inside values get truncated, double quotes in comments cause syntax errors, and exclamation points break parsing. A hacky workaround is to prefix comments with #; to satisfy both formats, but the real recommendation is to use a proper .env parsing library instead.

You can parse an .env file as an .ini with PHP - but there's a catch