til/unix/tell-direnv-to-load-the-env-file.md

Tell direnv To Load The Env File

By default direnv looks for and evaluates the .envrc file that appears in a given project directory. This default behavior is good for things like setting certain path dependencies (e.g. a specific version of node or postgres).

To the end of using direnv to set up the development environment, it can be useful to have it also load the .env file into the current shell's environment.

To get direnv to do that, add this line to the .envrc file:

dotenv_if_exists .env

This specific loads all the environment variables in .env. If there are other files, such as .env.development that need to be loaded in, those can be included with additional dotenv_if_exists declarations.