Dotenv CLI

As a small weekend project I wrote my own dotenv CLI. Dotenv-CLI is a simple package that provides the dotenv command. It reads the .env file from the current directory puts the contents in the environment and executes the given command.

Example .env file:

BASIC=basic basic
export EXPORT=foo
EMPTY=
INNER_QUOTES=this 'is' a test
INNER_QUOTES2=this "is" a test
TRIM_WHITESPACE= foo
KEEP_WHITESPACE="  foo  "
MULTILINE="multi\nline"
# some comment

becomes:

$ dotenv env
BASIC=basic basic
EXPORT=foo
EMPTY=
INNER_QUOTES=this 'is' a test
INNER_QUOTES2=this "is" a test
TRIM_WHITESPACE=foo
KEEP_WHITESPACE=  foo
MULTILINE=multi
line

where env is a simple command that outputs the current environment variables. A dotenv CLI comes in handy if you follow the 12 factor app methodology or just need to run a program locally with specific environment variables set.

While dotenv-cli is certainly not the first dotenv implementation, this one is written in Python and has no external dependencies except Python itself. It also provides a bash completion, so you can prefix any command with dotenv while still be able to use completion:

$ dotenv make <TAB>
all      clean    docs     lint     release  test

Since there’s also some other popular shells out there and I already struggled writing the simple bash completion script, it would be very nice if some more experienced zsh-, fish-, etc.- users could help me out in providing completions for them as well.

dotenv-cli is available on Debian and Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-dotenv-cli

and on PyPi as well:

$ pip install dotenv-cli