GoDotEnv

A Go (golang) port of the Ruby dotenv project (which loads env vars from a .env file).

From the original Library:

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.

But it is not always practical to set environment variables on development machines or continuous integration servers where multiple projects are run. Dotenv load variables from a .env file into ENV when the environment is bootstrapped.

It can be used as a library (for loading in env for your own daemons etc.) or as a bin command.

There is test coverage and CI for both linuxish and Windows environments, but I make no guarantees about the bin version working on Windows.

Installation

As a library

go get github.com/leonardopernett/godotenv

or if you want to use it as a bin command

go >= 1.17

go install github.com/leonardopernett/godotenv/cmd/godotenv@latest

go < 1.17

go get github.com/leonardopernett/godotenv/cmd/godotenv

Usage

Add your application configuration to your .env file in the root of your project:

S3_BUCKET=YOURS3BUCKET
SECRET_KEY=YOURSECRETKEYGOESHERE

Then in your Go app you can do something like

package main

import (
    "log"
    "os"

    "github.com/joho/godotenv"
)

func main() {
  err := godotenv.Load()
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal("Error loading .env file")
  }

  s3Bucket := os.Getenv("S3_BUCKET")
  secretKey := os.Getenv("SECRET_KEY")

  // now do something with s3 or whatever
}