Poetry Dotenv Plugin

A Poetry plugin that automatically loads environment variables from .env files into the environment before poetry commands are run.

Supports Python 3.7+¹

$ cat .env
MY_ENV_VAR='Hello World'

$ poetry run python -c 'import os; print(os.environ.get("MY_ENV_VAR"))'
Hello World

This plugin depends on the python-dotenv package for its functionality and therefore also supports features that python-dotenv supports. Interpolating variables using POSIX variable expansion for example.

Origins

Initial implementation based on the event handler application plugin example in the Poetry docs.

Install

poetry self add poetry-dotenv-plugin

Coming from Pipenv

If you are transitioning from pipenv there shouldn't be much to change with regard to the .env loading. If you were a user of pipenv's environment variables to control .env loading then you can use the analogous environment variables listed below.

Pipenv env var	Poetry env var
PIPENV_DOTENV_LOCATION	POETRY_DOTENV_LOCATION
PIPENV_DONT_LOAD_ENV	POETRY_DONT_LOAD_ENV

Overriding existing environment variables

By default, this plugin will override existing environment variables. This is because this plugin was built to make onboarding for users coming from pipenv as seamless as possible. If you want to prevent existing environment variables from being overridden, you can set the POETRY_DOTENV_DONT_OVERRIDE environment variable to true.²

Footnotes

1. Python 3.7 is supported only when using Poetry < 1.6.0, which dropped support for Python 3.7. ↩

2. See #16 for background. ↩