Environment Variable not loading with load_dotenv() in Linux

Question:

I’m trying to make a discord bot, and when I try to load a .env with load_dotenv() it doesn’t work because it says

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/fanjin/Documents/Python Projects/Discord Bot/bot.py", line 15, in <module>
    client.run(TOKEN)
  File "/home/fanjin/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/discord/client.py", line 708, in run
    return future.result()
  File "/home/fanjin/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/discord/client.py", line 687, in runner
    await self.start(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/fanjin/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/discord/client.py", line 650, in start
    await self.login(*args, bot=bot)
  File "/home/fanjin/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/discord/client.py", line 499, in login
    await self.http.static_login(token.strip(), bot=bot)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'strip

Here’s my code for the bot:

import os

import discord
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()
TOKEN = os.getenv('DISCORD_TOKEN')

client = discord.Client()

@client.event
async def on_ready():
    print(f'{client.user} has connected to Discord!')

client.run(TOKEN)

And the save.env file: (It’s a fake token)

# .env
DISCORD_TOKEN={Bzc0NjfUH8fEWFjg2NDMyMjY2.X6coqw.JyiOR89JIH7fFFoyOMufK_1A}

Both files are in the same directory, and I even tried to explicitly specify the .env’s path with

env_path = Path('path/to/file') / '.env'
load_dotenv(dotenv_path=env_path)

but that also didn’t work

Asked By: F.M

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Source

Answers:

I had same error trying to load my environment configuration on ubuntu 20.04 and python-dotenv 0.15.0. I was able to rectify this using python interpreter which will log out any error encountered while trying to load your environments. Whenever your environment variable is loaded successfully, load_dotenv() returns True.

For me it was an issue with my configuration file (syntax error) that broke the loading process. All i needed to do was to go to my environment variable config file and fix the broken syntax..

Try passing verbose=True when loading your environment variable (from python’s interpreter) to get more info from load_dotenv.

Answered By: spaceofmiah

So this took me a while. My load_dotenv() was returning True.

I had commas after some records which is not correct.

Once I removed the commas the variables were working.

Answered By: BrinkDaDrink
I was facing a similar issue and found out these three possible solutions/reasons:

  1. Check if the syntax in your .env file is correct or not, the original documentation will be the best source – Python Dotenv (sample below)

     DOMAIN=example.org
 ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@${DOMAIN}
 ROOT_URL=${DOMAIN}/app

  2. The solution which worked for me, was using find_dotenv() instead of file path inside load_dotenv(), the reason is load_dotenv() doesn’t load the .env file properly. find_dotenv() is a function that automatically finds .env file if it’s located in the same folder as your code file.

     from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv

 load_dotenv(find_dotenv())

  3. You can limit your search to the current project folder using sys.path[1] to make sure you’re reading the intended file.

     import sys
 from dotenv import load_dotenv
 load_dotenv(sys.path[1]) #try .path[0] if 1 doesn't work

Since, I moved my .env file’s inside another subfolder config, then I had to provide the full path to load_dotenv() to make it work.

import sys
from dotenv import load_dotenv
path = sys.path[1]+'/config/.env'  #try .path[0] if 1 doesn't work
load_dotenv(path)

[edited]

Answered By: shubham malik

You need to put the full path.

Use

  • either os.path.expanduser('~/Documents/MY_PROJECT/.env')

  • or: load_dotenv('/home/MY_USER/Documents/MY_PROJECT/.env')

and it will work.

Or you change your current working directory in your code editor to where the ".env" file is (which should be the project folder).

Or you open the project folder in the menu of your code editor, this should make the project folder the current working directory.

On Linux, you can also go to the project folder in the terminal and start the code editor from there, type for example codium or whatever you use in the command prompt.

TL:DR

Quote from the other answer

Since, I moved my .env file’s inside another subfolder config, then I had to provide the full path to load_dotenv() to make it work.

This gave me the idea of checking the working directory.

Current working directory

os.getcwd() gave me a folder further up the tree. And then I copied the ".env" file into that working directory and it worked.

Changing the working directory depends on your code editor. I use codium, which is the open source version of vscode, then you may follow for example Python in VSCode: Set working directory to python file’s path everytime

Full path

You can also put the full path.

Funny enough, I had checked that before coming here, but I copied the path that you get from the terminal, starting with '~/Documents/MY_PROJECT, which does not find the file but does not alert either, any tried environment variables were just empty – just because the ".env" file itself was never read.

Answered By: questionto42

I had:

variable = ‘variable’

changing them to be:

variable=variable

fixed the issue. (removing spaces, remove ”)

Answered By: Conor Quinn

I had a similar issue, and in my case, this solved it:

Instead of doing load_dotenv() I needed to do load_dotenv(override=True). This was because I had set one of the variables from the .env file manually, and so it was not updating with the value set in the .env file.

The parameter override defaults to False. Here is the definition, taken from the dotenv github:

override: Whether to override the system environment variables with the variables
            from the `.env` file.
Answered By: breadmaker