use Env::Dot;

print $ENV{'VAR_DEFINED_IN_DOTENV_FILE'};

More flexibility in how you manage and use your .env file.

Attn. Existing environment variables always take precedence to dotenv variables!

A dotenv variable (variable from a file) does not overwrite an existing environment variable. This is by design because a dotenv file is to augment the environment, not to replace it.

This means that you can override a variable in .env file by creating its counterpart in the environment. For instance:

unset VAR
echo "VAR='Good value'" >> .env
perl -e 'use Env::Dot; print "VAR:$ENV{VAR}\n";'
# VAR:Good value
VAR='Better value'; export VAR
perl -e 'use Env::Dot; print "VAR:$ENV{VAR}\n";'
# VAR:Better value

• If no .env file is present, then do nothing By default, Env::Dot will do nothing if there is no .env file. You can also configure Env::Dot to emit an alarm or break execution, if you want.

• Specify the other dotenv files with path If your .env file is located in another path, not the current working directory, you can use the environment variable ENVDOT_FILEPATHS to tell where your dotenv file is located. You can specify several file paths; just separate them by ":" (";" in Windows). Env::Dot will load all the files in the order you specify them, starting from the last, i.e. in reversed order. This is the same ordering as used in PATH variable: the first overrules the following ones, that is, when reading from the last path to the first path, if same variable is present in more than one file, the later one replaces the one already read.

• Support different types of .env files Unix Shell source command compatible dotenv files use double or single quotation marks (" or ') to define a variable which has spaces. But, for instance, Docker compatible .env files do not use quotation marks. The variable's value begins with = sign and ends with linefeed.

You can specify in the dotenv file itself - by using meta commands - which type of file it is.

Read .env file and turn its content into environment variables for different shells.

envdot reads your .env file and converts it into environment variable commands suitable for different shells (shell families): sh, csh and fish.

.env files can be written in different flavors. envdot supports the often used sh compatible flavor and the docker flavor which are not compatible with each other.

If you have several .env files, you can read them in at one go with the help of the environment variable ENVDOT_FILEPATHS. Separate the full paths with : character.

If you have set the variable ENVDOT_FILEPATHS, then envdot will use that. Otherwise, it respects the command line parameter. If no parameter, then default value is used. Default is the file .env in the current directory.

envdot [options]

eval `envdot`

eval `envdot --no-export --shell csh --dotenv subdir/.env`

ENVDOT_FILEPATHS=../.env:subdir/.env:.env eval `envdot`

Options: --help --man --version --export --no-export --shell -s --dotenv -e

The envdot command is also available as self contained executable. You can download it and run it as it is without additional installation of CPAN packages. Of course, you still need Perl, but Perl comes with any normal Linux installation.

This can be convenient if you want to, for instance, include envdot in a docker container build.

curl -LSs -o envdot https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mikkoi/env-dot/main/envdot.self-contained
chmod +x ./envdot

This software is copyright (c) 2023 by Mikko Koivunalho.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

Terms of the Perl programming language system itself:

a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version, or b) the "Artistic License"

The complete licenses are in the files LICENSE-Artistic-2.0 and LICENSE-GPL-3 within this repository. If these files are missing, they can be downloaded from the following urls:

* https://www.gnu.org/licenses/
* https://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic-license-20.html