The team restored service using a clean backup and environment variables injected via the CI/CD pipeline. They implemented:

Maya wrote a reflective post-mortem acknowledging the error and documenting the new safeguards.

On production servers:

chown www-data:www-data .env
chmod 640 .env

This allows the web server to read but prevents other system users from viewing it.

Subject: The .env File in Laravel Architecture Target Audience: Developers, DevOps Engineers, System Administrators Version: Laravel 8.x - 11.x