Today, we’re diving into something that might seem small but is actually incredibly important in your Laravel journey: how to properly use Laravel’s config files together with your .env variables. This is one of those topics that can really level up the way you structure and manage your application, especially if you’re building apps that need to run in different environments (development, staging, production, etc.).

In this guide, we’ll look at why eager loading should be considered a default practice when working with Eloquent models. It helps prevent hidden performance issues, reduces unnecessary database queries, and makes your application scale more predictably as it grows.