.env.local //free\\ Jun 2026

# .env.local HOSTNAME=localhost PORT=8080 API_URL=http://$HOSTNAME:$PORT/v1 # Results in: http://localhost:8080/v1

Imagine a team of five developers working on a project. The global .env file might point to a shared staging database. However, Developer A wants to test a destructive database migration on their own machine. By adding DATABASE_URL=postgresql://localhost:5432 to their .env.local file, Developer A overrides the shared staging URL without breaking the application for the other four developers. Why .env.local Must Be Ignored by Git .env.local

To solve this, developers use the pattern. This file contains all the required keys but leaves the sensitive values blank or fills them with dummy data. Unlike .env.local , the .env.example file is committed to Git. .env.local

This means: