PHP Dotenv VS Visual Studio Code

After successfully setting up our project, you'll observe that certain packages come pre-installed. One of these packages is vlucas/phpdotenv. This package serves the purpose of facilitating the loading of .env variables within your projects. These variables, stored in a file named '.env', allow for the configuration of various settings without hardcoding them directly into your code. Instead, you can define environment-specific variables such as database credentials, API keys, or any other sensitive information in the .env file, providing a more flexible and secure approach to configuration management.

Recently, I jumped to reading on the documentation of the function putenv() and define() and the array $_ENV to understand the different between all. Also, I looked at the library phpdotenv and how it handles environment variables since its the standard approach to go with when dealing with environment variables in PHP.

So to get down to it, what are some of the best practices here? First off, things that you would normally do, like utilize some sort of secrets manager, that won't be available to you. You also can't utilize environment variables with apache. So you're going to have to have some sort of local secret (password/passphrase) to perform the encryption/decryption. With that said, mysql does provide AES encryption with their AES_ENCRYPT/AES_DECRYPT calls, so in that manner, yes you can safely store PII or other values in a shared MySQL. You can use a php library like https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv The decryption password(s) should be in the .ENV file Nothing prevents you from utilizing some scheme perhaps to provide multiple passwords if you want to, perhaps a separate one for each individual column you plan to encrypt.

DotEnv - a popular library that allows us to use environment variables in our project.

[PHP dotenv.](https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv) Loads environment variables from `.env` to `getenv(), $_ENV` and `$_SERVER`

PHP dotenv. Loads environment variables from .env to getenv(), $_ENV and $_SERVER automagically.

Use this library https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv. Hopefully you are using composer. If not, please consider using it.

First, we need to have PHP installed as well as Composer (A dependency manager for PHP). Using Composer, we need to install dotenv which will allow us to read .env files.

Here, I'm using the vlucas/phpdotenv library to process .env files.

For beginners, the best code editor is Vscode.

An IDE or text editor; we'll use Visual Studio 2022 for this tutorial, but a lightweight IDE such as Visual Studio Code will work just as well

Choosing IDE: Selecting the right Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can make your coding experience smoother. Consider popular options like as PyCharm, Visual Studio Code, or Jupyter Notebook. Install your preferred IDE and configure it to work with Python.

It all starts with the editor. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is my go-to editor. I was using the Insider’s Edition for the longest time, but some extensions would try to log in and redirect to VS Code regular edition, so I decided to go back to it. That said, VS Code Insider's is very stable.

Meanwhile, a developer workflow that does not require access to AWS Management Console may provide a better experience. As a developer, I appreciate having an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio Code where I can code, deploy, and test in one place.

Good to know: If you're a Visual Studio Code user, you can enhance your coding experience by installing the ESLint and Prettier extensions. These extensions provide real-time error and warning highlighting, as well as automatic formatting and code fixing on save.

Download any code editor e.g. VS code. Visual Studio code which is a code editor with support for development operations like debugging, task running, and version control. Go to https://code.visualstudio.com

A code editor (VS Code is my go-to IDE), but feel free to use any code editor you're comfortable with.

First, grab your favorite command-line tool, Terminal or Warp, and a code editor, preferably VS Code and let’s begin.

C# is very good as a language, have developed in it for 5+ years. The problem is the gap between what MSFT promises to management and actually delivers to developers. You really really need to fully read the fine print, think of the omissions in documentation and implement a proof-of-concept that almost implements the full solution to find out the hidden gotchas.

For example, even probably their best product VS Code only got reasonable multiple screens support last year: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/10121#issuecommen...

And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have Teams.