Environment variable casting helper

[kblais]

Hi there !

When upgrading my application from Laravel 10 to 11, I faced an error because an environment variable was used as an integer, but not defined in my .env, which resulted in an empty string.

I then though it could be nice to have something like this : env()->int('MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE'), and some equivalents for float and datetime (returning a Carbon instance).

The implementation is pretty straightforward, just adding a wrapper around Illuminate\Support\Env::get($key, $default) with the corresponding cast :

/**
 * Get the value of an environment variable as a datetime.
 */
public function datetime(string $key, mixed $default = null): Carbon
{
    return new Carbon(self::get($key, $default));
}

/**
 * Get the value of an environment variable as a float.
 */
public function float(string $key, mixed $default = null): float
{
    return (float) self::get($key, $default);
}

/**
 * Get the value of an environment variable as an integer.
 */
public function int(string $key, mixed $default = null): int
{
    return (int) self::get($key, $default);
}

And a little modification of the env() helper in Illuminate/Support/helpers.php :

function env($key = null, $default = null)
{
    if (null === $key) {
        return new Env();
    }

    return Env::get($key, $default);
}

Any thoughts about this ? I'd be glad to talk about it 😄

[shaedrich]

Sounds like the logical conclusion to have also that after we already got this functionality for config variables, even though, env variables will almost exclusively be used in config files 🤔

[henzeb]

yeah, First we need to establish if this is a problem within that environment, or if OP is using env all over the place...