Lumen Micro Framework => php artisan key：generate

I'm trying out the PHP micro Framework Lumen (from Laravel).

One of my first steps was to look into the .env.example file and make a copy of it to have my .env file. There is a variable APP_KEY just like there is in Laravel. Now I tried out the simple command php artisan key:generate to get my new key But I ran into the following error message:

[InvalidArgumentException] There are no commands defined in the "key" namespace.

Does some one know how I can generate keys for Lumen?

Update with solution

So I found my favorite solution for this problem. On the command line (Linux) I run php -r "echo md5(uniqid()).\" \";" what gives me something like this 7142720170cef01171fd4af26ef17c93.

If you are going to use Lumen more often, you may want to create an alias in your .bashrc, which is located in your home directory /home/USERNAME. To do so, you can open the file with nano ~/.bashrc or vi ~/.bashrc and copy the following alias at the end of the file, alias phpkey='php -r "echo md5(uniqid()).\" \";"'. Now you can use the command phpkey which will give you a 32 character long random string :)

The Laravel command is fairly simple. It just generates a random 32 character long string. You can do the same in Lumen. Just temporarily add a route like this:

$router->get('/key', function() {
    return str_random(32);
});

Then go to /key in your browser and copy paste the key into your .env file.
Afterwards remove the route.

Obviously you could also use some random string generator online. Like this one

Firstly, you have to register your key generator command, put this Lumen Key Generator Commands to app/Console/Commands/KeyGenerateCommand.php. To make this command available in artisan, change app\Console\Kernel.php:

/**
 * The Artisan commands provided by your application.
 *
 * @var array
 */
protected $commands = [
    'App\Console\Commands\KeyGenerateCommand',
];

After that, configure your application so that Illuminate\Config\Repository instance has app.key value. To do this, change bootstrap/app.php:

<?php

require_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

Dotenv::load(__DIR__.'/../');

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Create The Application
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here we will load the environment and create the application instance
| that serves as the central piece of this framework. We'll use this
| application as an "IoC" container and router for this framework.
|
*/

$app = new Laravel\Lumen\Application(
    realpath(__DIR__.'/../')
);

$app->configure('app');

After that, copy your .env.example file to .env:

cp .env.example .env

Ignore this step if you already use .env file.

Enjoy you key:generate command via:

php artisan key:generate

Edit

You may use Lumen Generator. It covers so much commands you are missing from Laravel.

The APP_KEY generation is a step of development process (I don't think that creating temporarily routes is a practical way to do it). The function str_random can help us, but this function is part of Laravel/Lunmen framework. I recommend running tinker

php artisan tinker

and then run the function

>>> str_random(32)

The result is the key you're looking for.

=> "y3DLxnEczGWGN4CKUdk1S5GbMumU2dfH"

This answer was inspired by @thomas-venturini 's update to the question. Here's a bash script that takes care of creating .env and updating it with an APP_KEY using the aforementioned PHP command and the UNIX sed command:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

function generate_app_key {
    php -r "echo md5(uniqid()).\"
\";"
}

APP_KEY=$(generate_app_key)

sed -e s/APP_KEY=.*$/APP_KEY=${APP_KEY}/g .env.example > .env

Hope someone finds this useful.

An easy solution is just running PHP code from the terminal (without using tinker, because that is not available with Lumen):

php -r "require 'vendor/autoload.php'; echo str_random(32).PHP_EOL;"

It uses Laravel's Str::random() function that makes use of the secure random_bytes() function.

For me the easiest way to generate a Lumen key is typing on console one of these commands:

date | md5
date | md5sum

or

openssl rand -base64 24

depending of your environment. In my case, I aways use date | md5 on mac

I have used these commands:

php -r \"copy('.env.example', '.env');\"

php -r "echo password_hash(uniqid(), PASSWORD_BCRYPT).\"
\";"

The command generates a key similar to this:

$2y$10$jb3kw/vUANyzZ4ncMa4rwuR09qldQ2OjX8PGrVB5dIlSnUAPCGjFe

All I do on mac is execute this command in the terminal:

date | md5 | pbcopy

This copies the value into the clipboard and so you can easily paste the key into the .env file.

To generate key and use laravel command you need to install one package. The details are as below:

  1. You have to install package composer require flipbox/lumen-generator
  2. You have to add $app->register(Flipbox\LumenGenerator\LumenGeneratorServiceProvider::class); into bootstrap/app.php file.

Link: https://github.com/flipboxstudio/lumen-generator

Run php -a to start up interactive php playground.

Then run echo substr(md5(rand()), 0, 32); to generate a 32 character string.

You can then copy/paste into the .env file.

1.Open your terminal setup file:

vim ~/.zshrc

2.Create an alias for generating random strings:

# Lumen Key Generate
alias lumen-key="php -r \"require 'vendor/autoload.php'; echo base64_encode(str_random(32)).PHP_EOL;\""

3.Get a key whenever you need:

~/your-lumen-project via

Simply use PHP CLI. Run this from your local or a remote command line to generate a random 32-character Lumen APP_KEY:

php -r "echo bin2hex(random_bytes(16));"

Output: bae48aba23b3e4395b7f1b484dd25192

Works with PHP 7.x on Mac and Windows.