Laravel Environment Variables 5.3 setup

By default, Laravel git ignores the .env file that contains environment settings and configuration.

I would like to have a local .env, and a production .env that CAN be committed to my server so that I don't need to manually create production settings or touch the .env file at all and can use push to deploy techniques.

Anyone got any good solution for this? It seems a strange design decision to make developers always manually create the production settings in a single file, and not make it easy to switch between production and local settings. I was considering using git hooks to rename .production to .env but this seems like overkill, and I want to check that this functionality isn't available out of the box and I've missed it.

Bonus points for explaining why having three files .local.env, .production.env and .env (which switches between the two) files is a bad idea, and one the original team avoided.

I'm using the latest version of Laravel (5.3).

via Chebli Mohamed