ohmyzsh/plugins/dotenv

dotenv

Automatically load your project ENV variables from .env file when you cd into project root directory.

Storing configuration in the environment is one of the tenets of a twelve-factor app. Anything that is likely to change between deployment environments, such as resource handles for databases or credentials for external services, should be extracted from the code into environment variables.

Installation

Just add the plugin to your .zshrc:

plugins=(... dotenv)

Usage

Create .env file inside your project root directory and put your ENV variables there.

For example:

export AWS_S3_TOKEN=d84a83539134f28f412c652b09f9f98eff96c9a
export SECRET_KEY=7c6c72d959416d5aa368a409362ec6e2ac90d7f
export MONGO_URI=mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017
export PORT=3001

export is optional. This format works as well:

AWS_S3_TOKEN=d84a83539134f28f412c652b09f9f98eff96c9a
SECRET_KEY=7c6c72d959416d5aa368a409362ec6e2ac90d7f
MONGO_URI=mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017
PORT=3001

You can even mix both formats, although it's probably a bad idea.

ZSH_DOTENV_FILE

You can also modify the name of the file to be loaded with the variable ZSH_DOTENV_FILE. If the variable isn't set, the plugin will default to use .env. For example, this will make the plugin look for files named .dotenv and load them:

# in ~/.zshrc, before Oh My Zsh is sourced:
ZSH_DOTENV_FILE=.dotenv

Version Control

It's strongly recommended to add .env file to .gitignore, because usually it contains sensitive information such as your credentials, secret keys, passwords etc. You don't want to commit this file, it's supposed to be local only.

Disclaimer

This plugin only sources the .env file. Nothing less, nothing more. It doesn't do any checks. It's designed to be the fastest and simplest option. You're responsible for the .env file content. You can put some code (or weird symbols) there, but do it on your own risk. dotenv is the basic tool, yet it does the job.

If you need more advanced and feature-rich ENV management, check out these awesome projects:

• direnv
• zsh-autoenv