laravel 4: key not being generated with artisan

Question

When running

php artisan key:generate

I can see the generated key in my shell, but the variable \'key\' in app.php remains empt

Answer 1

The key generator will only update the APP_KEY in the .env file.

'key' => env('APP_KEY', 'YourSecretKey'), 

config/app.php this is reading the APP_KEY from your .env file. The second parameter is a fallback.