Preferred way to deal with ENV variables when developing locally?

[anandaroop]

I'm wondering what the preferred approach is for setting and reading environment variables is when you are developing locally with the preview server.

In other frameworks I might create a .env or .env.development file and rely on that to be read by dotenv or foreman or something similar, so that the ENV is set correctly when the preview server boots up.

So far, in lieu of that, I have:

• created a .env.sh file with my secrets in it
• updated my npm run dev package script from observable preview to source .env.sh && observable preview

So it does "just work" currently.

But is there something more conventional or simpler than this?

[mythmon]

Since data loaders and page loaders are programs, you're free to load environment variables however you like. For example, dotenv would work fine.

My personal preference is to use direnv which integrates with your shell to set environment variables when you are in a directory, which apply to any program you run. This is nice because it works with all kinds of tools, not just ones with support for special files.

[anandaroop]

I didn't know about direnv, thanks for the tip!