How to use .env inside fork tests?

[ChrisGV04]

I'm trying to contribute to the Payload repo by fixing an issue I reported. I already forked the project but I don't have MongoDB installed on my local machine, I use a remote MongoDB instance for my local development. So when I run yarn dev admin I get an error because it is trying to connect to a local instance of MongoDB.

Is there a way to use a .env file to set the MONGO_URL? I see that the dev.ts does use the process.env.MONGO_URL environment variable but it doesn't load the variables inside my .env, so every time I want to run a test, I have to write the full command:

MONGO_URL="my_instance_url" yarn dev admin

I know is not a big deal, but I guess it's more convenient to use a .env file for that.

[denolfe]

Currently, this is not possible with how we have it configured. In my mind, this would introduce variability into the tests unnecessarily.

We do have the ability to use a MongoDB memory server if you were to pass NODE_ENV=test as the prefix. This obviously doesn't resolve your ask for loading an .env file, though.

[ChrisGV04]

@denolfe Understood! Thank you very much.

I found a way to do it by setting the variable from the start command, so no big deal. It was good enough for my current setup