bkeepers/dotenv

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

6762 stars · 514 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A Ruby gem that loads environment variables from a `.env` file into `ENV` at application bootstrap, primarily for development and test environments. It integrates automatically with Rails and supports multiple env files, overwriting control, and ENV restore in tests.

Use cases

• load environment variables from a .env file in ruby
• manage app secrets in development without setting them manually
• keep configuration out of source code following twelve-factor
• load .env automatically in a rails app
• restore ENV state between tests
• use multiple env files with precedence

When to choose

• you're building a Ruby, Rails, or Sinatra app and want .env support
• you need dev/test environment configuration without overwriting real env vars
• you want automatic ENV restoration in test suites

When to avoid

• you're not using Ruby
• you need secrets management in production rather than a dev convenience
• you need encrypted or cloud-based secret storage

Facets

library · maturity stable

configuration-management developer-tools developer-tools web-development backend ruby cli dotenv environment-variables twelve-factor rails env-file

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="bkeepers/dotenv")