laravel4cookbook

Multisites 201
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This site definition assumes you are using PHP5 FPM. Getting this installed and running is out of
the scope of this tutorial, but there are plenty of great tutorials on the subject.
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You can learn more about virtual host entries, in Nginx, at: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/howto-set-up-nginx-virtual-hosts-server-blocks-on-ubuntu-12-04-lts–3.
Environments
Laravel 4 employs a system of execution environments. Think of these as different contexts in which
different configuration files will be loaded; determined by the host name of the machine or command
flags.
To illustrate this concept; think of the differences between developing and testing your applications
locally and running them on a production server. You will need to target different databases, use
different caching schemes etc.
This can be achieved, deterministically, by setting the environments to match the host names of the
machines the code will be executed (local and production respectively) and having different sets of
configuration files for each environment.
When a Laravel 4 application is executed, it will determine the environment that you are running it
in, and adjust the path to configuration files accordingly. This approach has two caveats.
The first caveat is that the PHP configuration files in app/config are always loaded and environmentbased
configuration files are then loaded on top of them. If you have a database set up in app/config/database.php
and nothing in app/config/production/database.php, the global database
configuration details will apply.
The second caveat is that you can override the environment Laravel 4 would otherwise use by
supplying an environment flag to artisan commands:
1 php artisan migrate --env=local
This will tell artisan to execute the database migrations in the local environment, whether or not
the environment you are running it in is local.
This is important to multisites because Laravel 4 configuration files have the ability to connect
to different database, load different views and send different emails based on environmental
configuration.