1) There's a few ways you could skin this proverbial cat: option 1: A bit python specific but you can use python-dotenv[1] for Python; and `source` that file

1) There's a few ways you could skin this proverbial cat: option 1: A bit python specific but you can use python-dotenv[1] for Python; and `source` that file in bash for shell support. option 2: Alternatively you could just pass environmental variables between applications (that's kind of the point of them). option 3: You could still use a dot env file and import that in other languages as TOML. This is a really nasty hacky way of doing things though because you'd need to read that file in, then prefix a key at the start of the file (eg "[vars]") to adhere to the TOML standard before you could run it through a TOML parser. I wouldn't personally recommend this approach but it would work as a lazy solution. 2) Sure there is, `envsubst`[2] hello.tmpl: This is an exmaple Hello, ${HELLO_NAME}! hello.env: HELLO_NAME="wodenokoto" hello.sh: #!/bin/sh source hello.env envsubst < hello.tmpl > hello.txt Run hello.sh and it will create a file called hello.txt: This is an exmaple Hello, wodenokoto! One caveat is that this is part of the gettext package which doesn't always ship with every distro. But it's a pretty small package (small enough that I don't have any issue installing it into a docker container for one CI pipeline). [1] https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/ https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/ [2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/envsubst https://linux.die.net/man/1/envsubst