For some reason, my production laravel app thinks that it is in the local environment.
/var/www/appname/.env.php
For all who want to know... to solve this issue, I just edited my httpd.conf file on the production server as follows:
SetEnv APP_ENV production
Now laravel knows that the app is in production.
If you are using nginx which I have now migrated my site to add the following where you pass scripts to the FCGI server in the active sites-available /etc/nginx/sites-available/{sitename}
:
fastcgi_param APP_ENV production;