Configuration

Loxodontu reads its configuration from a .env file at the project root (see .env.example), loaded via vlucas/phpdotenv. Loading is non-fatal — if .env is missing, the app still boots and falls back to whatever is already in the process environment (useful when a host injects env vars directly rather than via a file).

Internally, env() checks $_ENV first, then falls back to getenv(), since some SAPIs and PHP-FPM pools only populate one of the two — worth knowing if a variable "isn't picking up" on a particular host.

App

Variable	Default	Description
ENV	development	When set to development, enables verbose error display (display_errors, E_ALL) and makes the error handler re-throw exceptions instead of returning a generic 500. Use anything else (e.g. production) in production.
DEBUG	true	When true, edge function "invalid response" errors include a debug block with the resolved PHP binary path. Turn off in production.
APP_URL	—	Not read anywhere by the app itself — it's a convention for your own scripts and the curl examples throughout this documentation. Set it to whatever base URL you're calling.

Database

Variable	Description
DB_MODE	Selects which suffixed variable set below is used: development → _DEV, testing → _TEST, anything else → _PROD.
DB_HOST_DEV / DB_PORT_DEV / DB_USERNAME_DEV / DB_PASSWORD_DEV / DB_DATABASE_DEV	Development database connection.
DB_HOST_PROD / DB_PORT_PROD / DB_USERNAME_PROD / DB_PASSWORD_PROD / DB_DATABASE_PROD	Production database connection.
DB_HOST_TEST / DB_PORT_TEST / DB_USERNAME_TEST / DB_PASSWORD_TEST / DB_DATABASE_TEST	Test database connection — the test suite forces DB_MODE=testing itself regardless of what's set here, so this is safe to leave configured alongside a dev/prod setup. See Testing.

Only MySQL/MariaDB is supported end to end. The connection is lazy (no connection is opened until the first query), and on MySQL/MariaDB the target database is created automatically on first connect if it doesn't exist and the credentials have CREATE DATABASE privilege — table creation still requires running migrations (see Getting Started).

Cron worker

Variable	Default	Description
CRON_WORKER_TOKEN	—	Optional shared secret required by worker.php (as ?token= or --token=). Set this in production whenever worker.php is reachable from the web.
CRON_WORKER_LIMIT	10	How many due jobs a single worker invocation claims and executes before returning. Keep this small on shared hosting so each cron hit finishes quickly.
CRON_ALLOW_COMMANDS	false	Must be the literal string true to allow command-type cron jobs, which execute shell commands on the host. Leave disabled unless you trust every job creator.

See Cron Jobs for how the worker is invoked and how job types work.

Edge functions

Variable	Description
EDGE_PHP_BINARY	Overrides the CLI PHP binary used to spawn the sandboxed subprocess that runs edge function code. Set this on shared hosts where PHP_BINARY resolves to lsphp or php-cgi, which can't run as a plain CLI interpreter.

See Edge Functions for the sandbox model this feeds into.

Storage

Variable	Default	Description
STORAGE_PATH	storage/files (project root)	Absolute path where uploaded files are written to disk, one subdirectory per project and bucket.

See Storage for buckets, policies, and the upload/download API.