This is a showcase how you can implement Laravel like .env file structure in your CodeIgniter application, and make configurations easy for all the development, production, testing stages. You don't need to take care of application/config/database.php file each time you do git pull or put it in .gitignore.

Run composer require vlucas/phpdotenv command in your project root directory. (If you don't have composer.json, don't worry, composer will take care of it.

This will load your env file in environment.

If you are using vulcas/phpdotenv >= 4.x.x, then change code accordingly as mentioned in Env.php file.

This will add env helper method to get any variable stored in .env file.

Add library to $autoload['libraries'] like this

$autoload['libraries'] = array('env');

Add helper to $autoload['helper'] like this

$autoload['helper'] = array('general');

Make composer_autoload to vendor/autoload.php file path like this in config.php file

$config['composer_autoload'] = FCPATH. 'vendor'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'autoload.php';

Create an .env file in your project root folder.

In your php code you can access any .env variable like below

env('MY_VARIABLE');

Voila ! Now you can have multiple variables based on Environment, and don't need to manually change file and then put it in .gitignore.