Strange behaviour env variables since laravel 11 upgrade

[erik-braaksma-digipharma]

I recently upgraded one of my companies applications to Laravel 11 using shift.
Since then we have noticed that the default value of env variables that are defined in a config file are not used.
For example:
env('EXAMPLE_VARIABLE', '0')
I expect that my application uses '0' whenever I don't define it in my environment file. But I have noticed that it doesn't.
I need to explicitly define EXAMPLE_VARIABLE=0 in my env file other wise my application throws errors.
Is this a me problem or has anyone else come across a similar issue?

[Sophist-UK]

Could this be an issue of '0' (a string) vs. 0 (an integer)?

[ghost]

I know they are saying that if you cache your configs, then the env will be empty and you must use any env variable from the config.
But even if empty it should return the default value. Is this your case?

[ghost]

They changed the env function in 10 vs 9.

[erik-braaksma-digipharma]

I can be more specific. It is a variable that is used to setup a redis connection.

'database' => env('REDIS_DB', '0'),

This is what it says in the config. I have never touched this and it always worked without problems.
I have also never had to define this variable in my .env
This redis db is used for a pub - sub service.
Since the Laravel 11 upgrade we did not receive any errors in our application but we started to notice that some parts of our application were using their fall back implementations instead of the pub - sub service.
In the end I noticed this variable wasn't defined in our .env which I did and suddenly the application started using pub - sub again.
The .env has it also defined as a string. So it isn't a string -> int problem.

[ghost]

So it is not a problem of env helper.

[erik-braaksma-digipharma]

I just did env('REDIS_DB') in the staging environment which doesn't have this variable defined in its .env and I got null
I also did the same thing in our prod environment which does have the variable defined in its .env and I got '0'

[ghost]

Meaning you are caching config in prod and env is empty

[ghost]

Or the env is not reachable by the env helper in your prod.

[erik-braaksma-digipharma]

Yeah and the config('redis.config.database') does return '0' in both environments.
Maybe something has changed in Laravel 11 in the way a Redis connection is setup.