Sync Dotenv files¶
Usage: sync-dotenv [-f] [-p] [-h] [--completion COMPLETION]
Synchronize the .env file with the .env.template file.
Options
[-f, --fill-missing] Prompt to fill missing values.
[-p, --print-env] Print the updated .env file to the console without modifying it.
Help
[-h, --help] Show this message and exit.
[--completion COMPLETION] Use `--completion generate` to print shell-specific completion source. Valid options: generate, complete.
Any Django project created with the start-project command comes with a .env.template file. It serves as an example for the environment variables that
you need to fill in the .env file for your project to run. This command is a simple convenience that keeps the values in sync between the two files. It can be useful when you generate
a new project to create a .env file and when you add variables to the .env and don’t want to add them manually into the .env.template. You can even automate this process using a pre-commit hook
so that you never have to remember to keep your .env.template up to date.
Example of pre-commit hook
- repo: local
hooks:
- id: sync-dotenv
name: sync-dotenv
entry: hatch sync-dotenv
language: system
When you run the sync-dotenv command, it performs the following steps:
It reads the values from the
.env.templatefile, a set of default values (see below), and the.envfile, in that order. If the same key is present in multiple sources, the value from the later source is used.If the
--fill-missingoption is provided, it will prompt you to fill in any values that are currently empty.It sorts the configuration keys alphabetically.
It empties the
.envfile and writes the new configuration values to it. Each key-value pair is written on a new line, with the formatKEY=VALUE.It empties the
.env.templatefile and writes the new configuration keys to it. If a key was originally present in the.env.templatefile, its value is preserved; otherwise, the value is left empty.
Default values for production environments
If you run the command with DEBUG=False it will try to fill in some default values for variables, such as the
SECRET_KEY, DJANGO_SUPERUSER_EMAIL, DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD, etc, where it makes sense.
export DEBUG=False; falco sync-dotenv -p
You could, for example, pipe the result into another command to easily copy paste the config into your production environments.
export DEBUG=False; falco sync-dotenv -p -f | clipcopy