Environment Variables

Leapkit provides a handy tool to load environment variables from a .env file. This feature is useful when you want to load your environment variables from a file instead of setting them directly in your system, like when you're in development mode.

The leapkit template provides a .env file with some default values that you can use as a starting point. This is the initial configuration:

DATABASE_URL="leapkit.db"
GO_ENV="development"
PORT="3000"
SESSION_SECRET="secret"
SESSION_NAME="leapkit_session"

Depending on your project, you may choose to add or remove some of these variables. For example, if your application does not use sessions, you can eliminate the SESSION_SECRET and SESSION_NAME variables. Additionally, there is the HOST env variable used by Leapkit which default value is 0.0.0.0, but you can customize it to suit your needs.

HOST="0.0.0.0"
PORT="8080"

Adding Comments #

You can also add comments to your .env file by starting the line with a # character.

# This is a comment
PORT=8080

Multi-line values #

You can also add multi-line values to your .env file by wrapping the value between quotes .

GITHUB_SECRET_KEY="-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEpAIBAAKCAQEAqTmwQppL07nBl/0TEQ5sHcqj/Iz9BmuaaEu26jMXYt1QttHn
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"

Loading the environment variables #

To load the environment variables from the .env file into your application, perform an underscore import in your main.go file:

// main.go
import _ "go.leapkit.dev/core/envload"