#Resolution of environment variables

To automatically load environment variables from .env files (with the help of dotenv package) please set useDotenv property in serverless.yml as below:

useDotenv: true

Having that .env files will also be excluded from the package in order to avoid uploading sensitive data as a part of a package by mistake. Starting with the next major version, .env files will be loaded by default and useDotenv setting will be ignored.

#Support for .env files

The framework looks for .env and .env.{stage} files in service directory and then tries to load them using dotenv. If .env.{stage} is found, .env will not be loaded. If stage is not explicitly defined, it defaults to dev.

#Variable expansion

It is possible to define environment variables as a combination of existing ones:

BASE_URL=my.api.com
PROTOCOL=https

URL=$PROTOCOL/$BASE_URL

This is supported through dotenv-expand

#Differences against serverless-dotenv-plugin

There are a few differences between above functionality and serverless-dotenv-plugin:

• The framework only loads environments variables locally and does not pass them to your function's environment
• The framework loads variables from only one .env file (if stage-specific .env is found, default .env is not loaded)
• The framework does not support .env.local, .env.{stage}.local, and .env.development files in a similar way to the plugin
• The framework does not use NODE_ENV variable and --env flag when determining stage