Dotenv not loading properly

Question

I am trying to access some environment variables using process.env that were loaded by dotenv.

My folder structure :

.env
src
-- - server.js

My server.js configuration :

(...)
import auth from './middleware/auth'
import dotenv from 'dotenv'
dotenv.load({
    path: '../',
    silent: process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'
})
auth()
// Instantiate app
const app = express();

The file where I try to access process.env variable :

(...)
module.exports = function() {
        console.log("env", process.env.MONGODB_URI)
        var options = {};
        options.jwtFromRequest = ExtractJwt.fromAuthHeader()
        options.secretOrKey = process.env.JWT_SECRET

Which logs env, undefined, and then crashes with

TypeError: JwtStrategy requires a secret or key

Even if I move .env into src (same directory as server) and remove path in config, it fails.

Answer 1

It appears that when you specify the path, you need to make it full:

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

.env being your file

Answer 2

Try this; this should work.

import {} from 'dotenv/config'
import somethingElse from 'somethingElse'
...
[the rest of your code]

This works because of how ES6 modules imports modules.

If you want to dig into more. Please refer this. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/08/es6-in-depth-modules/

As a summary :

When you run a module containing an import declaration, the modules it imports are loaded first, then each module body is executed in a depth-first traversal of the dependency graph, avoiding cycles by skipping anything already executed.

Hope this will help someone.