dotenv run --no-override expands variables with the wrong precedence
Description
With dotenv run --no-override, a variable can keep its value from the environment while another variable referring to it gets the value from .env. This leaves the child process with inconsistent configuration.
Steps to reproduce
With python-dotenv[cli] installed, run:
import os
import subprocess
import sys
import tempfile
from pathlib import Path
with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as directory:
path = Path(directory) / ".env"
path.write_text(
"DOTENV_TEST_BASE=file\n"
"DOTENV_TEST_DERIVED=${DOTENV_TEST_BASE}/suffix\n"
)
env = dict(os.environ)
env["DOTENV_TEST_BASE"] = "environment"
env.pop("DOTENV_TEST_DERIVED", None)
subprocess.run(
[
sys.executable, "-m", "dotenv", "-f", str(path),
"run", "--no-override", sys.executable, "-c",
"import os; print(os.environ['DOTENV_TEST_BASE']); "
"print(os.environ['DOTENV_TEST_DERIVED'])",
],
env=env,
check=True,
)Expected behavior
Both values should use the existing environment variable, as they do with load_dotenv(override=False):
environment
environment/suffixActual behavior
environment
file/suffixAn existing empty string also reproduces this: the derived value is file/suffix instead of /suffix.
Environment
Reproduced on Windows with Python 3.13.15 and python-dotenv 1.2.3, from commit a00cb2eed0704cd6d2071b2004c37e95ccc86ee5.
Additional context
This is similar to #282, but affects the CLI. run calls dotenv_values(), which expands variables with override=True, before filtering out keys already in the environment. The fix is in #698.
Prepared with OpenAI Codex assistance.
Source: theskumar/python-dotenv