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 .env file needs to contain a line like this:

APP_KEY=

You don't have to specify a key, but you have to at least provide a .env file and also the above line.