I just spent a bunch of time looking into this, so in the off chance you're still having issues, [this document] (http://mattstauffer.co/blog/laravel-forge-using-environment-variables-for-environment-detection) helped me get past it. You might also try updating your deployment script to: php artisan migrate --env=production

		'host'      => getenv('DB_HOST') ? getenv('DB_HOST') : 'localhost',
		'database'  => getenv('DB_DATABASE') ? getenv('DB_DATABASE') : 'your_database',
		'username'  => getenv('DB_USER') ? getenv('DB_USER') : 'homestead',
		'password'  => getenv('DB_PASSWORD') ? getenv('DB_PASSWORD') : 'secret',

and set these four variables DB_HOST , DB_DATABASE , DB_USER , DB_PASSWORD accordingly @forge

DB_HOST will be your application IP address DB_DATABASE will be the database you created DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD check your mail from forge