blog/_posts/2016-03-04-load-your-config-into-your-environment.md

permalink	title	published_date	layout	data	tags
/{{ year }}/{{ month }}/{{ day }}/load-your-config-into-your-environment	Load your config into your environment	2016-03-04 12:30:00 +0100	post.liquid	route blog	rust

It became quite popular to store certain configuration variables in your environment, to be later loaded by your aplication. This way of having all configuration available is part of the twelve-factor app definition.

The idea is to place your variables in a .env file and load this as environment variables to be accessed by your application. Most of the time you can just plug in one of the dozens of libraries that load this config from a file and your application can fetch the values as normal from the environment.

But sometimes you might want to have this config loaded into your shell or some other interactive tool. That's where you can use dotenv-shell, a small tool, written in Rust. It wraps around rust-dotenv and allows to load the config and then execute a program (your shell by default).

First install the tool:

cargo install dotenv-shell

Create a .env file with your config:

echo "REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379" > .env

Then start a shell and you can access the configuration as environment variables:

$ dotenv-shell
$ echo $REDIS_URL
redis://localhost:6379

Of course you can launch whatever tool you want:

$ dotenv-shell /usr/bin/irb
irb(main):001:0> ENV['REDIS_URL']
=> "redis://localhost:6379"

Available on GitHub and as a Crate.

Update:

Only now I learn about another application doing just the same: benv by @timonvonk.