Environment Variables

The basic database settings for UserFrosting can be set through environment variables. By default, UserFrosting looks for the following environment variables:

Variable	Description
`UF_MODE`	The current environment Modes
`DB_DRIVER`	The database driver to use (choice of `mysql`, `pgsql`, `sqlite` or `sqlsrv`)
`DB_HOST`	The database host (ie.: localhost)
`DB_PORT`	The database port
`DB_NAME`	The name of the database to use for this install
`DB_USER`	The database user account
`DB_PASSWORD`	The database user password
`MAIL_MAILER`	Set to one of 'smtp', 'mail', 'qmail', 'sendmail'
`SMTP_HOST`	SMTP server host used to send emails
`SMTP_USER`	SMTP server user used to send emails
`SMTP_PASSWORD`	SMTP server user password used to send emails
`SMTP_PORT`	SMTP server port
`SMTP_AUTH`	SMTP server authentification enabled (true or false)
`SMTP_SECURE`	Enable TLS encryption. Set to `tls`, `ssl` or `false` (to disabled)

If you don't want to (or can't) configure environment variables directly in your development environment, UserFrosting uses the fantastic phpdotenv library to let you set these variables in a .env file. When running the bake installer, this file will be created for you. To make any modifications, your can run the following Bakery command:

$ php bakery setup

You can also edit the .env file manually. Simply copy the sample file in your app/ directory:

$ cp app/.env.example app/.env

Now, you can set values in the .env file and UserFrosting will pick them up as if they were actual environment variables.

You may also want to configure your SMTP server settings as well at this point so that you can use features that require mail, such as password reset and email verification. See Chapter 14 for more information on the mail service.