5 posts tagged with ".env"

At the end of 2023, I wrote a very long post about using Joomla with Docker: Create your Joomla website using Docker - Part 1.

It was a step-by-step introduction to Docker and the creation of a local Joomla-based website.

I explained, at length, the various steps involved in creating a website, choosing a database engine (MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL), choosing a specific version of Joomla / database engine, the type of volumes (should the site and database be kept in RAM or on the hard disk (i.e. the notion of volumes)) and many other things such as choosing the port for the website, creating an alias (something like http://my_project.local instead of http://127.0.0.1). I strongly urge you to read or re-read this article before starting this one.

As Docker and Joomla are evolving rapidly, I propose here to start from where we were and see what has changed since then.

We're also going to take automation a step further, making much greater use of the concept of makefile and a configuration file called .env.

In previous articles (Part 1 and Part 2), we've seen how to create a Joomla site from scratch by using Docker: pull Joomla, PHP, Apache and MySQL from Docker Hub and do magic stuff so we have a fresh http://127.0.0.1:8080 local site.

In this article, we'll see how to restore on our machine, a backup created thanks to great Akeeba Backup component.

We'll reuse some files from Part 2 and make some changes to them.

At the end, we'll have a make import command that will start Akeeba Kickstart.

This is a very common source of problems using .env files: you've two or more different .env file like .env and .env.example.

You're a programmer and coding a new amazing feature. You're adding one or more new environment variables to your local .env file and everything is working fine on your computer.

Why? Because the variable(s) you've added have been added in your local .env file, on your computer only.

As you know, you have to create the variables in the .env.example file too but let's be honest, nobody thinks about it.

When deploying a project on servers, we need to pay particular attention to the .env file. This file is crucial and will determine whether our application works properly (or crashes).

The normal way of doing things is to run a git clone command to get the latest version of the application from a repository (branch test for a test server, dev for an acceptance server, main for a production server).

Once cloned, the next command will be to create the .env file and it's done using cp .env.example .env.

And that's where the obligation to be meticulous begins.

Today, I was facing (once more) with the following need: I need to update a setting in a text file but if the variable is not yet present, I need to add it.

So, in short, I need to make a search and replace or insert new line.

Using sed it's quite easy to automate the search & replace but how to append?