.env
A .env file specifies your build/dev-time environment variables.
.gitignore
file to avoid pushing secrets to your repository.Dev, Build and Generate Time
Nuxt CLI has built-in dotenv support in development mode and when running nuxi build
and nuxi generate
.
In addition to any process environment variables, if you have a .env
file in your project root directory, it will be automatically loaded at dev, build and generate time. Any environment variables set there will be accessible within your nuxt.config
file and modules.
MY_ENV_VARIABLE=hello
.env
or removing the .env
file entirely will not unset values that have already been set.Custom File
If you want to use a different file - for example, to use .env.local
or .env.production
- you can do so by passing the --dotenv
flag when using nuxi
.
npx nuxi dev --dotenv .env.local
When updating .env
in development mode, the Nuxt instance is automatically restarted to apply new values to the process.env
.
Production
After your server is built, you are responsible for setting environment variables when you run the server.
Your .env
files will not be read at this point. How you do this is different for every environment.
This design decision was made to ensure compatibility across various deployment environments, some of which may not have a traditional file system available, such as serverless platforms or edge networks like Cloudflare Workers.
Since .env
files are not used in production, you must explicitly set environment variables using the tools and methods provided by your hosting environment. Here are some common approaches:
- You can pass the environment variables as arguments using the terminal:
$ DATABASE_HOST=mydatabaseconnectionstring node .output/server/index.mjs
- You can set environment variables in shell configuration files like
.bashrc
or.profile
. - Many cloud service providers, such as Vercel, Netlify, and AWS, provide interfaces for setting environment variables via their dashboards, CLI tools or configuration files.
Production Preview
For local production preview purpose, we recommend using nuxi preview
since using this command, the .env
file will be loaded into process.env
for convenience. Note that this command requires dependencies to be installed in the package directory.
Or you could pass the environment variables as arguments using the terminal. For example, on Linux or macOS:
DATABASE_HOST=mydatabaseconnectionstring node .output/server/index.mjs
Note that for a purely static site, it is not possible to set runtime configuration config after your project is prerendered.
appConfig
may be a better choice. You can define appConfig
both within your nuxt.config
(using environment variables) and also within an ~/app.config.ts
file in your project.