Supporting .env.local

[jsshapiro]

This should be small, but famous last words...

If there is already a way to handle this, feel free to stop me right here.

At the moment, I do not see a way to pull environment variable settings from a .env.local file. The concern is that there are always a few environment variables that contain application secrets. If those live in the pitchfork config file, then the config file cannot be committed to gtihub. This is more or less the use case for .env.local files.

Offhand, a first attempt would be to add env_from = file_path, where file_path points to a .env.local file.

Second stage, which may not be needed, would be to honor {{ }} when processing the environment file contents so that port numbers assigned by pitchfork can be added to environment variable strings. Items referenced inside {{}} must respect dependency order to ensure they are defined at time of expansion.

I haven't looked at the code that supports the current env command, but offhand I think I'd be willing to do the work and set up a pull request if there is interest.

[jdx]

Thanks for the suggestion. This didn't exist, so I put it together in #1031. It's called env_file:

[daemons.api]
run = "npm run server"
env_file = [".env", ".env.local"]
env = { NODE_ENV = "development" }

• Paths are relative to the pitchfork.toml that declares the daemon.
• Missing files are skipped, so a git-ignored .env.local is optional.
• Later files override earlier ones, and the daemon's own env overrides every file.
• Files are parsed with the same dotenv parser mise uses, so quoting, export and ${VAR} work as you'd expect.
• Your second stage works too. File values go through the same templating as env, so API_URL=http://localhost:{{ daemons.api.port }} picks up the port pitchfork assigned. Templating follows the existing depends ordering.

Files are read when the daemon starts, so secrets never get written into pitchfork.toml. Feedback on the PR is welcome.

AI-assisted — Tool: Claude Code; model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5; version: unavailable.

[github-actions[bot]]

Implemented in #1031: feat(config): add env_file to load daemon env from dotenv files

[github-actions[bot]]

Fixed in v2.31.0 by #1031.