Magento 2: Why is rebuilding config.php from CLI failing with 'Invalid Base URL'?

Question

To set the background I am using Magento 2.3.0 and have imported (successfully so far) data from an existing multi-store site. I now can't access either the front end or the admin area of the site since the config has now changed and Magento throws an Exception requesting I rebuild config.php. The problem started when I changed a config key from the command line (the admin frontend URL).

Now when I try to rebuild /etc/config.php using

php bin/magento app:config:import

I receive the error Import failed: Invalid Base URL. The value must be a URL or one of the placeholders: {{base_url}} ... which incidentally is a pretty feeble error message as it doesn't even indicate which key is causing the problem.

After stepping through the code I can see one of the offending keys is web/unsecure/base_web_url for the default scope which is causing the problem since in Magento 2 core post config read processing it is returning http:/// which clearly is an invalid URL. This is despite the fact that in my database (in core_config_data) there is an entry for that path and scope with a valid URL (which does end with a trailing /).

Stepping deeper into the code I can see the problem is that module-store/Model/Config/Placeholder is calling /App/Request/Http->getDistroBaseUrl() which uses the PHP Server variable ['HTTP_HOST'] to determine the host which is blank when called from the command line and hence returns the http:///.

If anyone can shed any light on how this can be resolved I'd be very grateful.

Answer 1

Similar issue in the past was all down to cache in your CLI run the following

rm -rf var/cache/ generation/

After you have done the above run

php bin/magento setup:upgrade && php bin/magento setup:static-content:deplpoy

You may need to force the deployment process you can do that by adding -f to the end over the second command

after which worked fine make sure that parameter is set and valid in the database before as config is cached in magento 2