joho/godotenv

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

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.

As a library

or if you want to use it as a bin command

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

Then in your Go app you can do something like

If you're even lazier than that, you can just take advantage of the autoload package which will read in .env on import

While .env in the project root is the default, you don't have to be constrained, both examples below are 100% legit

If you want to be really fancy with your env file you can do comments and exports (below is a valid env file)

Or finally you can do YAML(ish) style

as a final aside, if you don't want godotenv munging your env you can just get a map back instead