How do I use an env file with GitHub Actions?

Question

I have multiple environments (dev, qa, prod) and I'm using .env files to store secrets etc... Now I'm switching to GitHub Actions, and I want to use my .env files and declare them into the env section of the github actions yml.

But from what I've seen so far, it seems that I can not set a file path and I have to manually re-declare all variables.

How should I proceed as best practice?

Answer 1

a quick solution here could be having a step to manually create the .env file before you need it.

- name: Create env file         run: |           touch .env           echo API_ENDPOINT="https://xxx.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com" >> .env           echo API_KEY=${{ secrets.API_KEY }} >> .env           cat .env  

Answer 2

The easiest way to do this is to create the .env file as a github secret and then create the .env file in your action.
So step 1 is to create the .env files as a secret in github as a base64 encoded string:
openssl base64 -A -in qa.env -out qa.txt
or
cat qa.env | base64 -w 0 > qa.txt
Then in you action, you can do something like

- name: Do Something with env files   env:     QA_ENV_FILE: ${{ secrets.QA_ENV_FILE }}     PROD_ENV_FILE: ${{ secrets.PROD_ENV_FILE }}   run: |     [ "$YOUR_ENVIRONMENT" = qa ] && echo $QA_ENV_FILE | base64 --decode > .env     [ "$YOUR_ENVIRONMENT" = prod ] && echo $PROD_ENV_FILE | base64 --decode > .env 

There are a number of ways for determining $YOUR_ENVIRONMENT but usually this can be extracted from the GITHUB_REF object. You applications should be able to read from the .env files as needed.