long-env

An env() alternative that works with long multi-line environment variables in places where it's not possible to do so natively - eg. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Imagine you want to run Laravel Passport in AWS so you need to pass your private key as a PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable but hey 1) AWS doesn't allow multi-line environment variables 2) AWS has a limit of 4096 character per environment variable.

So you end up getting an annoying error like this:

Service:AmazonCloudFormation, Message:Template format error: Parameter 'EnvironmentVariables' default value '[****]' length is greater than 4096.

Solution

Our solution is simple, go to config/passport.php and replace

<?php 
return [
    'private_key' => env('PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY')
];

with:

return [
    'private_key' => long_env('PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY')
];

And now pass your long variable as numbered chunks instead of one super long string:

PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY1=
PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY2=
PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY3=
# and so on

The long_env() function will magically combine them together for you. If you need help making the chunks, just use the long_env_prepare() function provided with this package:

<?php
  json_encode(long_env_prepare('KEY', 'SUPER LONG STRING'), JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);

{
    "KEY1": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE K",
    "KEY2": "EY-----\ndasokd aoskd",
    "KEY3": "o aksdoaskd oaskdo a"
}

That's it - copy & paste these one by one into your dashboard (eg. AWS Elastic Beanstalk's Configuration tab)