How To Use LC_MONETARY In Laravel

If you are using the awesome money_format function in PHP, you may have noticed a difference between servers or environments regarding the output.

Sometimes you do get the trailing zeros. Sometimes not.

If you are ever trying to figure out what is going on here, it usually has to do with the current locale of the application. In Laravel, you can make this change in the AppServiceProvider:

class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    /**
     * Bootstrap any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function boot()
    {
        // set the money locale for money_format to work nicely
        setlocale(LC_MONETARY, 'en_US.UTF-8');
    }

    // ... rest of the provider

And that should be it. Now when using money_format, the output should be normalized.