Can you confirm that your staging server is running in the staging environment? I sounds like you already have, but just in case, calling dd(App::envinronment()); from a route should let you know.

Yup: response is string(7) "staging"

And I know that it's not even attempting to load my .env.staging.php file because I tried adding some gibberish to it and it won't even throw an error acknowledging that..

Well, I bet you already know, but all of the dot file loading seems to be in the Config section. What's the error you're seeing?

This:

As you can see, it's simply not acknowledging the .env.staging.php file in which all those $_ENV variables are set..

All I want to know is: Which part of the code (laravel or apache, not sure) identifies a .env.name.php file and loads it up.. it's quite an annoying problem as I don't even know how to debug it..

Like I linked to above, all of the dot file loading happens in the config folder. You can browse through those files to figure out where there is a problem.

Thanks man for trying to help, but I've checked everything in the config folder, not a single line loads the .env.name.file , I think it's a php.ini or Apache thing, but I can't find any reference for it..

Have you tried changing $_ENV to getenv()?

Sounds good. If you run into another block, feel free to post again and I'll try to help!