dotenv file is not loading environment variables

Question

I have .env file at root folder file

NODE_ENV=development NODE_HOST=localhost NODE_PORT=4000 NODE_HTTPS=false DB_HOST=localhost DB_USERNAME=user DB_PASSWORD=user 

And server.js file in the root/app/config/server.js folder. The first line of server.js file is

require('dotenv').config();

I also tried following:

require('dotenv').config({path: '../.env'});

require('dotenv').config({path: '../../.env'});

However, my env variable are not loaded when I run the server.js file from command prompt

node root/app/config/server.js

If I use the visual studio and press F5, it loads!!

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, what I'm missing. Any suggestion is highly appreciate. Thanks.

Answer 1

How about use require('dotenv').config({path:__dirname+'/./../../.env'}) ?

Your problem seems to be the execution path.

Answer 2

This solved my issues in Node v8.14.1:

const path = require('path') require('dotenv').config({ path: path.resolve(__dirname, '../.env') }) 

Simply doing require('dotenv').config({path:__dirname+'/./../../.env'}) resulted in a location that resolved as /some/path/to/env/./../../.env