Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

feature request: load multiple `.env` file before running a command

Open
#418 9 comments 9 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start at the dotenv command-line entry point and inspect how repeated -f options are parsed and loaded. Reproduce the example with host_config.env and user_credentials.env, then verify that values from both files are available with the established precedence behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have different configuration for my application that I intend to be composable. For example imagine I have env files with config values for database server hosts, and other env files with user credentials. I want to choose a combination of the two. I try to do something like

dotenv -f host_config.env -f user_credentials.env run bash do_things_with_db.sh

However it seems that only the last file is taken into account. I think this would be a useful feature to be able to load multiple files. What do you people think about it?

Dominant language
Python
Stars
8.9k
Forks
581
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from theskumar/python-dotenv

All issues in theskumar/python-dotenv

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.