Support for env.{enviroment-name}

[quornik]

As in react / next.js it is a nice feature to support the env.envname convention. At this point, Payload does not support for ex. env.local and suggest to gitignore the env at all. Some of the vars we need are safe to be stored in repo, and that is how we are customed to use .env for.

[jmikrut]

Hey @quornik — great call! Although, as Payload "plugs in" to your own Node apps, this is actually something you'd need to do yourself completely outside of Payload.

We actually don't load .env at all—instead, that's up to you and typically people will use dotenv to do so.

So, to do what you're looking for is pretty easy. Wherever you're using dotenv in your app, you could just replace it with something like this:

require('dotenv').config({ path: `.env.${process.env.NODE_ENV}` })

Boom! Done! Now, the .env file will be loaded dynamically based on the environment that you're running in and you can safely check in an .env.development or similar directly into your repo.

Is that what you're looking for?