ruby - Is it possible to refresh ENV during runtime

Question

I am using the dotenv Gem to read variables in my .env file. I created a console command that updates the .env file, but also in the same runtime, it reads them. The problem is that it reads the old values, even though I updated the .env file. Is there a way to refresh the ENV during runtime so it gets the latest values?

.env

FOOBAR=hello

ruby.rb

puts ENV['FOOBAR'] # Prints "hello"
EnvFile.update_variable('.env', 'FOOBAR', "How are you?")
Dotenv.load('.env')
puts ENV['FOOBAR'] # Prints "hello" even though looking in .env it has the new value "How are you?"

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66050054/is-it-possible-to-refresh-env-during-runtime

Answer 1

Do you mean you are using dotenv? rbenv manages ruby installs and doesn't read .env from what I searched in the source code. With dotenv, you can reload ENV from the .env file by calling Dotenv.load. It's probably going to give you warnings about constants being redefined. What I would do is make a config class to combine the default settings from ENV with the redefining feature/function you want. Config manages everything but reads defaults from .env.