A Go (golang) port of the Ruby dotenv project (which loads env vars from a .env file)
From the original Library:
> Storing configuration in the environment is one of the tenets of a twelve-factor app. Anything that is likely to change between deployment environments–such as resource handles for databases or credentials for external services–should be extracted from the code into environment variables.
>
> But it is not always practical to set environment variables on development machines or continuous integration servers where multiple projects are run. Dotenv load variables from a .env file into ENV when the environment is bootstrapped.
It can be used as a library (for loading in env for your own daemons etc) or as a bin command.
There is test coverage and CI for both linuxish and windows environments, but I make no guarantees about the bin version working on windows.
## Installation
As a library
```shell
go get github.com/joho/godotenv
```
or if you want to use it as a bin command
```shell
go get github.com/joho/godotenv/cmd/godotenv
```
## Usage
Add your application configuration to your `.env` file in the root of your project:
```shell
S3_BUCKET=YOURS3BUCKET
SECRET_KEY=YOURSECRETKEYGOESHERE
```
Then in your Go app you can do something like
```go
package main
import (
"github.com/joho/godotenv"
"log"
"os"
)
func main() {
err := godotenv.Load()
if err != nil {
log.Fatal("Error loading .env file")
}
s3Bucket := os.Getenv("S3_BUCKET")
secretKey := os.Getenv("SECRET_KEY")
// now do something with s3 or whatever
}
```
If you're even lazier than that, you can just take advantage of the autoload package which will read in `.env` on import
```go
import _ "github.com/joho/godotenv/autoload"
```
While `.env` in the project root is the default, you don't have to be constrained, both examples below are 100% legit
The original library [dotenv](https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv) was written by [Brandon Keepers](http://opensoul.org/), and this port was done by [John Barton](https://johnbarton.co/) based off the tests/fixtures in the original library.