Configuration

The decisions behind the environment file, and what must change before production.

Configuration lives in .env. The full list of variables with their defaults is in Environment variables; this page is about the choices behind them.

Two database connections

FaPost uses one PostgreSQL server with two logical scopes.

Landlord holds platform-level records — the tenant list, the webhook routing registry, queues and cache tables. Tenant holds everything belonging to an organisation, in its own schema.

You configure one connection. The tenant schema is selected at runtime from it, which is why there is no second set of DB_* variables and why the database user needs the CREATE privilege: schemas are created as tenants are.

Redis is not optional

Redis carries four things, and losing any of them has a distinct symptom:

Carries	If it goes
Queues	Nothing is processed — messages arrive and are never answered
Cache	Slower, but working
Locks	Concurrent messages from one contact can race
Webhook routing registry	Inbound messages resolve nowhere

The registry is the one that surprises people. It exists so that resolving an incoming webhook never touches the landlord database — the hot path stays a Redis lookup. That makes Redis part of the delivery path, not just an accelerator.

REDIS_PREFIX must match between the application and the webhook gateway if you run one. A mismatch is silent: the gateway reads an empty registry, decides it knows nothing, and forwards every delivery to PHP. Everything works, slower, for no visible reason.

Webhooks and the public address

Two variables decide where providers deliver.

WEBHOOK_BASE_URL is the address the application builds callback URLs from. It must be publicly reachable over HTTPS — providers will not deliver to anything else.

WEBHOOK_INGRESS_DRIVER chooses what handles them: laravel for the application itself, gateway for the Go service.

The driver applies to newly registered channels only. Existing channels keep the URL their provider already stored, and the Laravel route stays live regardless — so switching is not a cutover. Move the rest with php artisan ops:ingress-migrate --apply.

What must change for production

The shipped .env.example is a development file. Four values are unsafe as they stand:

APP_DEBUG	true exposes stack traces with configuration in them. Set false.
APP_KEY	Empty. Generate one, and never reuse it across installations.
TELESCOPE_ENABLED	true records every request, including their contents.
HCAPTCHA_*	Ships with hCaptcha’s public test keys, which always pass.

Set a REDIS_PASSWORD on anything but a local machine.

Languages

APP_LOCALE and APP_FALLBACK_LOCALE are the admin interface language.

What an assistant says to a contact is decided elsewhere entirely — tenant settings, assistant settings, and the flow itself. Changing these variables does not change a single word a contact receives.

Applying changes

Configuration is read at boot. After editing .env:

php artisan config:clear

Then restart Horizon — long-running workers hold the configuration they started with, and a worker that has not been restarted is still using the old values however many times you clear the cache.