How to prevent Netlify CLI from injecting .env?

Soviut · February 12, 2022, 8:22am

I have a Vite + Vue 3 application that uses a Netlify function as an API endpoint so the easiest way to serve them both locally is the Netlify CLI, specifically netlify dev.

When netlify dev is run, it announce that it is injecting the variables from the .env file.

◈ Netlify Dev ◈
◈ Ignored general context env var: LANG (defined in process)
◈ Injected .env file env var: VITE_API_URL
◈ Loaded function api (http://localhost:8888/.netlify/functions/api).
◈ Functions server is listening on 41127
◈ Starting Netlify Dev with Vite

The problem is, because this variable is injected into the Netlify runtime environment, Vite considers it a system variable and won’t overwrite it from .env.local or any other .env files.

(from the Vite docs)

environment variables that already exist when Vite is executed have the highest priority and will not be overwritten by .env files.

Is there any way to configure netlify.toml or a CLI flag that can disable the automatic injection of the .env variables into the netlify environment?

Soviut · February 12, 2022, 10:43pm

After looking through the source code, I’ve created a feature request on the Netlify CLI github repo.

github.com/netlify/cli

CLI flag or config to prevent .env variables being injected

opened 10:42PM - 12 Feb 22 UTC

Soviut

type: feature

**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.** I'm runnin…g a Vite + Vue 3 application with an API client that has to point to different URLs depending on the environment. Vite supports setting these in `.env`, `.env.local`, etc. These files load in a priority order so that `.env.local` values override `.env` values. However, if the environment variable is already set in the system, the `.env` and `.env.local` values will be ignored; they won't override. Unfortunately, since `netlify dev` injects the `.env` values. These effectively become system environment variables and the `.env.local` is unable to override them. **Describe the solution you'd like** There are several solutions: 1. A CLI flag or a config file option to disable injecting `.env` 2. A way to specify which dotenv files to exclude during the injection 3. A more fine-grained way to specify which system environment variables to exclude during injection **Describe alternatives you've considered** My current solution involves putting my local environment variable in to `.env` and setting the production override in `.env.production`. This works because the build is done with `NODE_ENV` as `production`. This works, but isn't an ideal way to organize environment variables. **Additional context** **Can you submit a pull request?** No > Pull requests are welcome! If you would like to help us add this feature, please check our > [contributions guidelines](../../CONTRIBUTING.md).

Soviut · May 24, 2022, 10:54pm

The feature request I submitted went through a little while ago. You can now configure your netlify.toml to include an envFiles array under the [dev] heading.

netlify.toml

[dev]
  envFiles = [".env.netlify.local", ".env.netlify"]

The order the files are loaded is highest to lowest. So in the example above the variables in .env.netlify.local would take priority over the ones .env.netlify if there is a conflict.