Is there a way to change the path to the .env file?

September 11, 2024

I used to have the following project structure:

| *other files.py*
| main.py
| .env

Then, I decided to sort the files into directories. The structure turned out to be as follows:

| src
| ∟ *other files.py*
| | main.py
| | .env

Everything worked before that. After that, when I try to get an environment variable, I get None. If you return .env to the directory above, as it was before, everything works again.

Is there a way to change the path to the .env file without decouple?

I rescheduled .env the file to another folder and would like to receive a variable, not None.

>Solution :

If you are using python-dotenv, you can manually specify the path to the .env file in your main.py or wherever you’re loading environment variables.

Assuming your new structure looks like this:

src/
├── main.py
├── .env
└── other_files.py

You can load the .env file in your main.py like this:

from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os

# Specify the full path to your .env file in the src directory
env_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '.env')
load_dotenv(dotenv_path=env_path)

# Now, you can access environment variables as usual
my_var = os.getenv('MY_ENV_VARIABLE')

print(my_var)  # This should not return None if the variable is correctly set in .env

where .env file would have