Incompatibility with PHP 7.4 line 52 src/Util/Str.php

[maietta]

ERROR 500 - Internal Server Error
substr() expects parameter 1 to be string, bool given [/var/www/html/vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Util/Str.php:52]        

[vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Util/Str.php:52] substr()
[vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Store/File/Reader.php:76] Dotenv\Util\Str::utf8()
[vendor/phpoption/phpoption/src/PhpOption/Some.php:108] Dotenv\Store\File\Reader::Dotenv\Store\File\{closure}()
[vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Store/File/Reader.php:79] PhpOption\Some->flatMap()
[vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Store/File/Reader.php:48] Dotenv\Store\File\Reader::readFromFile()
[vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Store/FileStore.php:62] Dotenv\Store\File\Reader::read()
[vendor/vlucas/phpdotenv/src/Dotenv.php:222] Dotenv\Store\FileStore->read()
[global.php:32] Dotenv\Dotenv->load()
[process_tables.php:3] require('/var/www/html/global.php')

To fix this, I changed line 52  in /src/Util/Str.php from:

    if (\substr($converted, 0, 3) == "\xEF\xBB\xBF") {

to 

    if (\substr("$converted", 0, 3) == "\xEF\xBB\xBF") {

That appears to have "fixed" my problem.

[GrahamCampbell]

Oh, crap. Thanks for pointing this out, introduced in #501. This happens when decoding fails. I'll adjust the code so the proper error is bubbled up for you. I think the change you made will instead result in the .env file being thrown away.

[maietta]

Thank you!

[GrahamCampbell]

What encoding were you trying to use btw? My "fix" will just make your app crash with an error saying "UTF-8 decoding failed." instead.

[maietta]

What encoding were you trying to use btw? My "fix" will just make your app crash with an error saying "UTF-8 decoding failed." instead.

Not sure, just plain text I suppose. I know it's UTF-8 though. No weird characters or BOM's introduced.

[GrahamCampbell]

What's happening is mb_convert_encoding($input, 'UTF-8') is returning false on your machine.

[GrahamCampbell]

You could try installing ext-mbstring. We use a symfony provided polyfill if the extension is missing, which may contain bugs. Using the extension may fix this issue for you.

[maietta]

I ran composer require ext-mbstring and that installed fine. Same error.

My .env file looks like this:

PMA_HOSTNAME = "phpmyadmin.localhost"
MYSQL_DATABASE = m00000685
MYSQL_USER = m00000685
MYSQL_PASSWORD = redacted
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD = redacted
MYSQL_PORT = 3306

Don't know if that helps.

The PHP loader looks like this:

<?php

require_once("/var/www/html/vendor/autoload.php");
$env = Dotenv\Dotenv::createImmutable("/var/www");
$env->load();
extract($_ENV);
$dsn = "mysql:host=mysql;dbname=${MYSQL_DATABASE};port=${MYSQL_PORT};charset=utf8mb4;";
...

[GrahamCampbell]

It is not possible to install PHP extensions using composer. It's likely the extension is still not installed.

Can you run this code on your server:

<?php

var_dump(function_exists('mb_convert_encoding'));

[maietta]

I found the php7-mbstring package for Alpine Linux, 3.15.0 which is what I am building for my lightweight Nginx + PHP-FPM container which my application runs in.

I've gone ahead and added the Alpine php7-mbstring package so now that core function made available.

After doing this, the problem went away. This is not a bug in your software. This was the lack of the proper core PHP function being available after upgrading my container to PHP 7.4.

Thank you for helping me pinpoint this.

[eduardomart]

I am also getting Internal Server Error when trying to load dotenv in a production server.
If I comment out the following two lines, the internal server error goes away, so I know it has to do with dotenv

$dotenv = Dotenv\Dotenv::createImmutable(__DIR__);
$dotenv->safeload();

I tried your suggestion and ran var_dump(function_exists('mb_convert_encoding')); and I get: bool(true)

also tried maietta's suggestion in the first post, but it made no difference in my case.

I am running the same php version locally and on my production server (7.4.32)