The wonders of python-dotenv

python-dotenv is a ridiculously helpful Python library to programatically load environment variables you have in a .env file into your script and Jupyter notebooks.

Install it:

pip install python-dotenv

Put this code block at the top of scripts or notebooks:

from dotenv import load_dotenv
# find .env automagically by walking up directories until it's found
dotenv_path = find_dotenv()
# load up the entries as environment variables
load_dotenv(dotenv_path)

If you want to load .env into your shell environment programmatically, you can run:

set -a; source .env; set +a

This is helpful when a Streamlit app or FastAPI application needs .env variables.

If you want zsh to do this automatically every time a new shell session is opened, you can use this plugin.