Hidden laravel config env paths maybe you don't know

There are some interesting env config keys of Laravel didn't mention in official documentation about storage path and cache path. May be you will never need to custom them in you entire developer life, but i think just know their existence, it's fun!

By default in your Laravel application, you ussually have those folders:

• bootstrap/cache: stores your application cached files such as routes, configs, events
• storage/: stores compiled views, cache, session files, logs and upload files, etc

About storage folder when deployment, i acctually just create an folder outside of the application and make a symbol link to the app, so we dont erase out uploaded files every time we deploy, and i think you doo too.

But acctually if you look at code at Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php you can see there are some hidden env configs maybe useful sometimes.

Customize storage path

You can modify default storage path by calling $app->useStoragePath($yourPath) in the bootstrap/app.php.

public function useStoragePath($path)
{
    $this->storagePath = $path;

    $this->instance('path.storage', $path);

    return $this;
}

Customize framework cache paths

Now take a look at this normalizeCachePath function, if our value starts with any absolute prefixes / or \, so it will use absolute path, other wise relative path.

protected function normalizeCachePath($key, $default)
{
    if (is_null($env = Env::get($key))) {
        return $this->bootstrapPath($default);
    }

    return Str::startsWith($env, $this->absoluteCachePathPrefixes)
            ? $env
            : $this->basePath($env);
}

And there are some hidden config if you want to customize the bootstrap/cache folder. This will useful when use want to ship application in some where you don't have write permission in the application folder xD.

You can set values for these keys in the .env file:

• APP_SERVICES_CACHE
• APP_PACKAGES_CACHE
• APP_CONFIG_CACHE
• APP_ROUTES_CACHE
• APP_EVENTS_CACHE