Remote postgres connection on circleci build to run laravel phpunit tests - laravel

Question

We are using laravel 5.6, postgresql and circleci in our api production environment and still trying to implement some key unit tests to run before a commit is merged to master.
When trying to configure the remote postgresql database access on circle, there's the following problem:
Our .circleci/config.yml was supposed to pull a custom built image (edunicastro/docker:latest) and run phpunit tests in the "build" step
But we are getting the following error message:
PDOException: SQLSTATE[08006] [7] could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "127.0.0.1" and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
The problem is this was supposed to connect to our remote database, but in our production environment we have the connection set up using .env and laravel.
I have tried copying the "DB_PGSQL_HOST" key to our config.yml but nothing changed, it kept trying to connect to 127.0.0.1.
Using the key "PGHOST" instead also had no effect.
This is the relevant, "build" part of our config.yml:
version: 2
jobs:
build:
docker:
- image: edunicastro/docker:latest
environment:
DB_PGSQL_CONNECTION: <prod_laravel_connection_name>
DB_PGSQL_HOST: <prod_db_host>
DB_PGSQL_PORT: 5432
DB_PGSQL_DATABASE: <prod_db_name>
working_directory: ~/repo
steps:
- checkout
- restore_cache:
keys:
- v1-dependencies-{{ checksum "composer.json" }}
- v1-dependencies-
- run: composer install -n --prefer-dist
- run: ./vendor/bin/phpunit
- save_cache:
paths:
- ./vendor
key: v1-dependencies-{{ checksum "composer.json" }}

Answer 1

Okay, I was missing the command to copy the .env over, right under - checkout:
- checkout
- run: cp .env.test .env
Laravel was already configured and set to use it, so I didn't need to change anything else.