dotenvguard 0.2.0

Catch missing .env variables before they crash production

dotenvguard

You know the drill. Someone adds STRIPE_KEY to .env.example, forgets to mention it, and the next deploy blows up with a KeyError. dotenvguard catches that before it happens.

$ dotenvguard check

                         dotenvguard
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Variable     ┃ Status  ┃ Default                        ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ DATABASE_URL │   ok    │ postgres://localhost:5432/mydb  │
│ API_KEY      │   ok    │                                │
│ SECRET_TOKEN │  empty  │                                │
│ REDIS_URL    │ MISSING │ redis://localhost:6379          │
│ STRIPE_KEY   │ MISSING │                                │
└──────────────┴─────────┴────────────────────────────────┘

2 missing variables out of 5 required

Install

pip install dotenvguard

# or with uv
uv tool install dotenvguard

How it works

Point it at a directory. It finds .env and .env.example, compares them, and tells you what's off.

dotenvguard check                  # current dir
dotenvguard check /path/to/project # somewhere else
dotenvguard check --json           # machine-readable output
dotenvguard check --extra          # also show vars in .env that aren't in .env.example

Custom file paths if your setup is weird:

dotenvguard check --env .env.local --example .env.template

It picks up .env.example, .env.sample, and .env.template automatically, so most projects just work out of the box.

Drop it in CI

Exits with code 1 when something's missing. That's it.

# GitHub Actions
- run: pip install dotenvguard && dotenvguard check

Or as a pre-commit hook:

repos:
  - repo: local
    hooks:
      - id: dotenvguard
        name: dotenvguard
        entry: dotenvguard check
        language: python
        additional_dependencies: [dotenvguard]
        pass_filenames: false

What the statuses mean

Status	What it means
ok	Present in .env with a value. You're good.
MISSING	In .env.example but not in your .env at all.
empty	Key exists but the value is blank.
extra	In .env but not in .env.example. Orphaned.

Handles real .env files

Not just KEY=value. The parser deals with the stuff you actually see in the wild:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/db    # standard
SECRET="value with spaces"             # quoted
export API_KEY=sk-1234                  # export prefix
DEBUG=true  # enable debug mode        # inline comments
DSN=postgres://u:p@host/db?ssl=require # equals in values

Why I built this

I got tired of deployments failing because someone added an env var and forgot to tell the team. python-dotenv loads vars but doesn't check if they're all there. pydantic-settings validates at runtime but you need to write a Settings class. I just wanted one command I could run before pushing.

License

MIT