til/mise/read-existing-dot-env-file-into-env-vars.md

Read Existing Dot Env File Into Env Vars

Just about any web app that I've worked on has had a .env file as a way of configuring aspects of the app specific to that environment. These typically are read into the environment with a language-specific dotenv tool.

Mise supports this convention. In addition to specifying individual non-secret env vars, you can also instruct mise to read-in a .env file like so:

[env]
PORT=3344
_.file = ".env"

The _.file line tells mise that there is a file .env with key-value pairs that it should read in. It can even handle .env.json and .env.toml file formats.

To ensure that mise is picking up the values from the .env file, you can run the following command and make sure they show up in the output:

$ mise env

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