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 the same problem. I had created a file named .env, but in reality the file ended up being .env.txt.

I created a new file, saved it in form of 'No Extension' and boom, the file was real .env and worked perfectly.

Answer 2

For React apps created with the create-react-app template, you don't need to use dotenv directly. react-scripts does that for you.

Simply creates a .env file in the top level directory of your project and add all your envs there, but notice that they MUST start with REACT_APP prefix, otherwise they will be ignored.

More details in their documentation. I just spent a couple of hours dealing with this and hope it will save you some time.

Answer 3

I solved this just renaming the file to .env to y file was named config.env , when I renamed to .env , it works.

Answer 4

I spent a lot of time going through these fixes. I was developing locally and just had to restart the server because the .env file isn't hot reloaded.

Answer 5

My problem was stupid. I created the .env in a text editor, and when I saved it it actually saved as

'.env.txt' 

which was only visible after I did a

'ls -a'

in terminal and saw the file name.

A quick:

mv .env.txt .env

And I was in business

Answer 6

If you are facing this problem it could be that the environment variable(s) is added/loaded after the file that requires the specific variable

const express = require('express');

const app = express();
const mongoose = require('mongoose');
const dotenv = require('dotenv');
const morgan = require('morgan');

const passport = require('passport'); //you want to use process.env.JWT_SECRET (you will get undefined)

dotenv.config();

in the above case, you will get undefined for the process.env.JWT_SECRET

So the solution is that you put dotenv.config() before const passport = require('passport');

const express = require('express');

const app = express();
const mongoose = require('mongoose');
const dotenv = require('dotenv');
const morgan = require('morgan');
dotenv.config();   
const passport = require('passport'); //you want to use process.env.JWT_SECRET (you will get the value for the enviroment variable)