oh-my-zsh/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=(git man dotenv)

Usage

Create .env file inside your project directory and put your local ENV variables there. The contents of .env are run in the context of the current shell session. Do not forget to export the variables, otherwise they will only be available within the current shell session and not be part of ENV (unless they were already in ENV beforehand).

For example:

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

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 supposed to be local only.