How do I setup the dotenv file in Node.js?

Question

I am trying to use the dotenv NPM package and it is not working for me. I have a file config/config.js with the following content:

Answer 1

I had a problem also with .env variables not loading and being undefined.

What I tried:

index.js:

import dotenv from 'dotenv';
dotenv.config();
import models from './models';

models.js

import Sequelize from 'sequelize';
const sequelize = new Sequelize(
    process.env.DATABASE,
    process.env.DATABASE_USER,
    process.env.DATABASE_PASSWORD,
    {
        dialect: 'postgres',
    }
);

Apparently, because of how loading the imports works in nodejs, the import of models in index.js caused that the models.js was executed before dotenv.config(). Therefore I got undefined values from process.env.

When I changed models.js to do the dotenv configuration like:

import Sequelize from 'sequelize';
import dotenv from 'dotenv';
dotenv.config();
const sequelize = new Sequelize(
    process.env.DATABASE,
    process.env.DATABASE_USER,
    process.env.DATABASE_PASSWORD,
    {
        dialect: 'postgres',
    }
);

it started to work!