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.env format

The parser follows the de-facto .env convention: one KEY=VALUE per line, with quoting, comments and escapes.

Basic rules

  • Empty lines and lines starting with # are ignored.
  • Lines starting with export are skipped (they are not assignments).
  • The first = on the line separates the key from the value. Trailing = characters are part of the value.
  • Whitespace around the key and around the value is trimmed.
  • Duplicate keys: last one wins.
APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false

MYSQL_HOST = 127.0.0.1
MYSQL_PORT = 3306
EMPTY_VALUE =

Quoting

Quote style Behavior
'single' Literal — no escape sequences are interpreted.
"double" Supports \n, \r, \t, \", \\, plus literal pass-through for any other escape.
unquoted Trimmed; an inline # preceded by whitespace starts a comment. 
LITERAL_TEXT = 'text with literal \n and \t'
SERVER_NAME = "My SA:MP Server"
MOTD = "Line 1\nLine 2"
WINDOWS_PATH = "C:\\samp\\plugins"

Inline comments

A # only starts a comment when preceded by whitespace. Without preceding whitespace it is part of the value.

WITH_INLINE_COMMENT = value # this comment is ignored
HASH_WITHOUT_SPACE = value#this_is_part_of_the_value

Encoding

The file must be valid UTF-8. A leading BOM (U+FEFF) is stripped automatically. Files larger than 1 MiB are rejected with a warning.

Full example

examples/env in the repository walks through every syntactic feature shown above in a single annotated file — copy it to .env, edit the values, and you're set.