Add support for python-dotenv at the config level

Overview

I’d love to see brownie support a .env file for environment variables. For new engineers, or a project that doesn’t want to keep a ton of environment variables running, a .env file is a warm welcome. Truffle and Hardhat (the javascript smart contract frameworks) have really nice config files that allow them to work with .env files. A bit of a quality of life improvement.

Otherwise, we have to call in the .env file in all our script manually, seems pretty redundant to do so.

Specification

Not sure how this is normal done in yaml, but would like to see something like: dotenv: true

And then they can load via a .env file. We could just use https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/ to load at the start of all the scripts.

Dependencies

https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/

What do we think?

[omarish]

I agree. I’d just like to get buy-in from @iamdefinitelyahuman before building something out.

When it comes to crypto projects, I’m an advocate for configuration over convention. Writing an extra line in a config file is a great price to pay, especially if it means avoiding unexpected configuration behavior.

[omarish]

Makes sense. I can add this in; should be pretty straightforward. Sorry for the delay, recently made the 2to3 family migration and just getting back into my routine now.