Error Connecting Database: Using Environment Variables into wp-config.php

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I want to configure a wordpress site for which my wp-config should take database values from Environment variables. I have set my environment variables but during it shows “Error establishing a database connection”.

here is the code i am using

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define('DB_NAME', getenv('DB'));
define('DB_USER', getenv('us'));
define('DB_PASSWORD', getenv('pa'));
define('DB_HOST', getenv('end'));

I have tried it running from terminal as well but error is same. I am not able to figure out what is causing this problem. 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Database Error</title>

</head>
<body>
    <h1>Error establishing a database connection</h1>
</body>
</html>

Is their something being missed??

Post Views: 3

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4 comments

  1. You are defining same DB_NAME constant for database user name, password and host change the constants

    Try like this

    define('DB_NAME', getenv('DB'));
define('DB_USER', getenv('us'));
define('DB_PASSWORD', getenv('pa'));
define('DB_HOST', getenv('end'));

  3. I was receiving the same error. It looked like my wp-config.php was being called twice from two different locations. The way I was referencing my .env file was incorrect.

    If you’re doing anything similar to this in your wp-config.php:

    $dotenv = DotenvDotenv::create(__DIR__);
if(file_exists(".env")) {
    $dotenv->load();
}

    The correct way is by referencing the right path before the file. Like so:

    $dotenv = DotenvDotenv::create(__DIR__);
if(file_exists($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/' . '.env')) {
    $dotenv->load();
}

    This ended up solving my problem when I called environment variables like so:

    define( 'DB_HOST', getenv('DB_HOST') );

  4. You can also set variables using the php.ini file. In some shared hostings (like uberspace) you have a special php.d folder with custom ini files.

    This is how your wordpress.ini file could look like:

    WP_DB_NAME=example
...

    And this is how you can access it in wp-config.php:

    ...
define( 'DB_NAME', get_cfg_var('WP_DB_NAME') );
...

    Make sure to reload the php config. This is somewhat special to your provider, I could also imagine that they reload it every 5 minutes or so. On uberspace you can do it with:

    uberspace tools restart php

    Sadly not all hosting providers give you that much freedom. However this was a nice way for me to place the configuration somewhere outside the folder where all my wordpress files are. Then I can safely backup them without exposing the database password in the backup.