Environment Variable not loading with load_dotenv() in Linux
Nov 8
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={XXXXXXXX}
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
python
linux1 answer
Accepted answer · original discussion
Jan 20
TL:DR
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.
Background
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.
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Nov 8