Laravel 5.2 not reading env file

Wow. Good grief. It's because I had an env value with a space in it, not surrounded by quotes

This

SITE_NAME=My website

Changed to this

SITE_NAME="My website"

Fixed it. I think this had to do with Laravel 5.2 now upgrading vlucas/phpdotenv from 1.1.1 to 2.1.0

From the official Laravel 5.2 Upgrade Notes:

If you are using the config:cache command during deployment, you must make sure that you are only calling the env function from within your configuration files, and not from anywhere else in your application.

If you are calling env from within your application, it is strongly recommended you add proper configuration values to your configuration files and call env from that location instead, allowing you to convert your env calls to config calls.

Reference: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/upgrade#upgrade-5.2.0

If any of your .env variables contains white space, make sure you wrap them in double-quotes. For example:

SITE_NAME="My website"

Don't forget to clear your cache before testing:

php artisan config:cache
php artisan config:clear

For me it has worked this in this order:

php artisan config:cache
php artisan config:clear
php artisan cache:clear

And I've tried all the rests without luck.