Store Sensitive Data Securely

To store sensitive data, such as database credentials or API keys, securely in your Laravel application, you should use environment variables. Laravel includes the dotenv package to enable you to load environment variables from a .env file.

Here’s an example .env file:

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=mydatabase
DB_USERNAME=myuser
DB_PASSWORD=mypassword

In your Laravel application, you can access these environment variables using the env function:

$host = env('DB_HOST');
$port = env('DB_PORT');
$database = env('DB_DATABASE');
$username = env('DB_USERNAME');
$password = env('DB_PASSWORD');