"false" showing up mysteriously in terminal? - mysql

Question

Terminal is giving me an issue where it prints "false"
Additionally, "false" shows up before the html view in the Laravel output.
I am running into this on codecourse's Classified's Site tutorial
Any idea how to remedy?
More detail:
I think what set this off was I changed the config/database.php for mysql from strict = true to false (have since changed back).
After changing mysql strict = true, I reloaded vagrant with provision on and did a migrate:reset and migrate then reseeded the database. Yet, when I run commands in terminal (eg. php artisan migrate), 'false' gets displayed on the next line before the migrations happen. and annoyingly, my website displays "false" in the top of the view, before the html doctype in the source gets written I took a look around the routes and views and cannot see how the false is creeping in there (especially since I changed it back to true!)
Any idea how to remedy, or suggestions for what to try?
See sample terminal Code below
vagrant#homestead:~/code/fresh$ php artisan migrate
falseMigrating: 2018_02_16_130447_create_listings_table
Migrated: 2018_02_16_130447_create_listings_table
vagrant#homestead:~/code/fresh$ php artisan make:controller Listing\ListingController
falseController created successfully.
vagrant#homestead:~/code/fresh$
Thank you Sam for the answer, I had accidentally put "false" ABOVE the start of the php declaration on the first line of my database config file

Answer 1

A PHP file can contain non-php and remain valid, i.e the following is valid:
false <?php echo '<h1>Hello World!</h1>'; ?>
That would produce the following:
false <h1>Hello World!</h1>
Laravel configuration files are simple PHP files that return an array, that file is included by the framework and the app configuration is populated from the values in the array. The behaviour you're seeing is indicative of a file within your application containing content that shouldn't be there, and based on what you were doing when the issue occured it's probably one of your configuration files.
Run the following command from your project root:
$ grep -r "false" config
Then review each instance of "false". You'll most likely find that at the top of your config/database.php file you've mistakenly placed false before the opening tag <?php.
For future reference, if you're using version control it is much easier to identify the cause of issues like this because you can step through every change you've made since the issue started. GitHub has a great desktop client that makes version control very easy :-)