Provide a global binary which can load .env into the current shell environment.

[liudonghua123]

I want to load the environment variables from a .env file into the current shell. From the docs, I could not find how can I achieve it. If this package could provide a global binary like dotenv then I can execute it like dotenv --dotenv_config_path=.env.

[zenflow]

https://github.com/entropitor/dotenv-cli

[liudonghua123]

@zenflow Maybe this feature would be impossible to implement. The closest way to achieve this feature would create a new child process, and pass the envs into it.

You can also execute source .env directly in Unix/Linux or generate a temp bat file which contains a batch of set command, invoke it If you are using Windows cmd.

See more details in the following references.

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/372627/is-it-possible-to-pass-environment-variables-from-child-to-parent-in-user-space.
• Support load .env into the current shell dkundel/node-env-run#19

[motdotla]

Thanks for the thoughts here @liudonghua123. I'm going to go ahead and close this. If others take an interest in this beyond dotenv-cli, then it will be something we consider.