What Is Environment file?
Environment file, or env file for short, is a standard way to communicate options and arguments for a process in software development.
An environment file consists of environment variables maintained as a configuration file.
There are different environment file formats for UNIX shells, Docker, JavaScript and others. A tool like shdotenv can be used to import and convert between different formats.
Typically environment file has a file name extension .env. The best practice in JavaScript development is to have a file with name .env (no name body) that is ignored in version control and contains the secrets needed by a software developer for the local development.
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