I'm using Laravel 5.4 on Windows 7 and Xampp 3.2.2. A few days ago Laravel started ignoring the changes I was making to the .env file. I couldn't find the solution so I reinstalled Laravel in a different directory and imported my app folder.
Now Laravel just stopped responding to the changes I am making to some PHP files. I added a function to the /vendor/illuminate/support/helpers.php but I could not access it in the view. I deleted the content of the whole file and I could still access the function previously declared in it. I created a helpers file as instructed here but that too is being ignored.
Any changes to any views is immediately effected and php artisan cache:clear is not doing anything.
How is this happening? Does it even make sense?
I know it might sound rather stupid, but have you remembered to restart the server because you've edited the .env file?
Laravel caches config values to improve performance.
You need to run either (recommended)
php artisan config:cache
which will cache the new values you have, or
php artisan config:clear
which will turn off caching. I've had some experience with this causing errors though.