As of Laravel 5.5.13, there’s a new feature that allows you to blacklist certain variables in config/app.php under the key debug_blacklist.

When an exception is thrown, whoops will mask these values with asterisks * for each character.

To activate this feature, add the next lines inside config/app.php

...
    'debug_blacklist' => [
        '_ENV' => [
            'APP_KEY',
            'DB_PASSWORD',
            'REDIS_PASSWORD',
            'MAIL_PASSWORD',
            'PUSHER_APP_KEY',
            'PUSHER_APP_SECRET',
        ],
        '_SERVER' => [
            'APP_KEY',
            'DB_PASSWORD',
            'REDIS_PASSWORD',
            'MAIL_PASSWORD',
            'PUSHER_APP_KEY',
            'PUSHER_APP_SECRET',
        ],
        '_POST' => [
            'password',
        ],
    ],
...

Save the file and clear the config cache with

php artisan config:clear

After this, all keys added inside debug_blacklist array will be replaced with asterisks (************)

PHPShield is an PHP encoder application that is used to protect the PHP code which is an excellent option for encoding your PHP files if you don’t require any time limiting, IP/Domain locking or other licensing features which are available in phpSHIED older brother SourceGuardian.

This post will cover installing phpSHIELD on a Linux server (RH based distros). You must have root access to your server which means if you have shared hosting account, you won’t be able to install phpSHIELD. In this case, you’ll need to contact your hosting provider and to ask them about phpshield loades.

The first step is to find out which PHP version do you have with

# php -v

and you will get something like

PHP 5.1.6 (cli) (built: Feb  2 2012 18:25:25)
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

Then download loaders from this link (according to your platform) and unpack them on your local drive.

The next step is to upload encoded files and visit app link. You should get something like

PHP script /var/www/html/myApp/index.php is protected by phpSHIELD and requires the phpSHIELD loader phpshield.5.1.lin. The phpSHIELD loader has not been installed, or is not installed correctly. Please visit the phpSHIELD php encoder site to download required loader.

Note: The files in my case were encoded by older PHPShield (3.1). The new version (8.x) will probably have the same message where phpshield.5.1.lin will be replaced with ixed.5.1.lin

I suppose that your server is a 64bit which means that PHP will load modules from /usr/lib64/php/modules dir.

Copy downloaded ixed.5.1.lin file inside /usr/lib64/php/modules dir.

Then open /etc/php.ini and add the next line at the end of the file

extension=ixed.5.1.lin

Save the changes and restart apache (service httpd restart)

If you are using PDO (PHP Data Objects) and you’re having problems with utf-8, try to add PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND option inside PDO definition like I wrote below.

$db = new PDO(
    'mysql:host=example.com;dbname=dbName',
    "username",
    "password",
    array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));