Configure your project

Settings live in two places. Anything that changes between machines is an environment variable, read from .env and covered in The environment file. Anything that belongs to the product is a committed value in config/ and travels with the repository. This guide covers the committed values a developer changes when a project starts, the environment variables they read, and every feature flag with exactly what it turns off.

Name, home and project key

Logo and icon

'logo' => 'images/logo.svg',
'icon' => 'images/icon.svg',

Both are paths inside public/, resolved with asset(). The logo is the wide image in the header of the application layout. The icon is the square one: the favicon, the image above the sign-in, registration, verification and password screens, the compact header on small screens, the picture of a notification in the notification centre and in a web push, and the base image php artisan pwa:generate-assets offers when it builds the PWA icons and splash screens. Replace the two files or point the keys at your own.

Administrators and seeded accounts

'sudo' => [
    '[email protected]',
],

'default_users' => [
    '[email protected]',
],

php artisan db:seed reads both lists. For every email in either list it creates the account when it does not exist yet, including a soft-deleted one:

• The name is the part before @, in headline case: [email protected] is Admin.
• The email is verified on the spot, so the account signs in without a code.
• The password is the part before @ reversed: [email protected] signs in with nimda.

The sudo list does two more things. The seeder gives each of those accounts the role named in admin_role, and when the password is still the generated one it marks the account so the next sign-in is sent to change it before reaching anything else. The list also defines who is a super-administrator at runtime: $user->sudo is true for any account whose email is on it, which opens the DevZone at /admin/dev, allows reading the activity log, and keeps other administrators from deleting the account. See Sudo and super-administrators.

default_users receives no role and no forced password change. Use it for the test accounts you want on every environment you seed.

The list is committed, so put your own email there before the first seed and keep [email protected] out of production.

Feature flags

config/features.php decides which optional parts of the product exist. Every flag reads an environment variable and defaults to false, so a fresh .env has all of them off. Turn one on by writing the variable:

FEATURE_ANNOUNCEMENTS=true
FEATURE_PLANS_ENABLED=true
FEATURE_ADDONS_ENABLED=true
FEATURE_TRACKING_ENABLED=true
FEATURE_REFERRALS_ENABLED=true
FEATURE_TICKETS_ENABLED=true
FEATURE_CHAT_ENABLED=true
FEATURE_ASSISTANT_ENABLED=true

.env.example only lists FEATURE_PLANS_ENABLED, FEATURE_ADDONS_ENABLED, FEATURE_TICKETS_ENABLED and FEATURE_CHAT_ENABLED; add the others yourself.

The admin menu hides a resource when its policy denies viewAny, and every policy above denies everything while its flag is off. That is why a section you cannot see also cannot be reached by typing its URL.

The referral sub-keys

The referrals array carries the program's numbers as well as its switch. See Referrals for the flow.

The assistant sub-keys

The assistant array carries the support assistant's settings as well as its switch. The assistant always talks to Anthropic with ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, and it answers on the queue, so a worker has to be running. Its screen is described in the guide «Support assistant».

The deployment trap

Because every flag defaults to off, a section that works on your machine and is missing on the server is almost always a variable that was never written to the server's .env. The symptom is silent: no error, the menu entry is simply not there. Write the flags on the server too, and clear the configuration cache after changing them. See Deploy your project.

The rest of config/app.php

The permission keys decide what php artisan db:seed generates for the admin panel. The full flow is in Roles and permissions.

The committed values of config/pricing.php

These matter once FEATURE_PLANS_ENABLED or FEATURE_ADDONS_ENABLED is on. How to use them is in Create and price a plan and Free trials and coupons.

Rates are fetched by php artisan billing:sync-exchange-rates, scheduled daily at 12:00 while plans or add-ons are enabled, for the dates that had a paid subscription in a currency other than the primary one.