How generate a Laravel APP_KEY with OpenSSL

Hello everyone, today I will show you a little trick that I use frequently in my scripts to create a Laravel application key commonly generated with artisan.

It's simple, with the help of the openssl package we can generate a random string of 32 characters and at the same time, it can be encoded in base64.

This will generate a fully valid laravel application key that you can use in your .env configuration file.

echo "base64:$(openssl rand -base64 32)"

Thanks for reading this little tip, don't forget to share it on your social networks or with your development team.

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Comments

[Gregori Piñeres]

Laravel added a flag to the command to get a valid key without modifying the .env file

php artisan key:generate --show

[Zubair Mohsin]

Hi, thanks for sharing this tip. Just curious about the reason behind it? Or is it just another way to do it?

[Gregori Piñeres]

On one occasion I had to do it this way to generate a secret file in a Laravel application in Kubernetes. Obviously this is another way to do it without having the PHP interpreter installed locally. However you do it, the result is the same.

[Brama Udi]

Just in-case if need a PHP version:

$rand = random_bytes(32); // chiper = AES-256-CBC ? 32 : 16
echo 'base64:'.base64_encode($rand);