Autocomplete data on IDEs

The best way to work with Environment Variables is using the autocomplete (or IntelliSense) feature from your IDE. To make this work with dotenv read data, Stela updates his stub file (stela.__init__.pyi) every time you change your dotenv files.

This stub file needs to be saved on the same folder which you've installed the stela package (normally via package manager). In other words, in a folder outside your project. To this work, please make sure the user which starts your project has sufficient privileges to access these external folders.

It works for dynamic variables too

The same is true for values retrieved from other sources than dotenv files (see next section "The Stela Loader" ). The stub file is always updated after Stela process the loader.

Troubleshooting stub creation

You can enable Stela logs (show_logs) to see the messages regarding stub creation.

.stelapyproject.tomlshell

[stela]
show_logs = true

[tool.stela]
show_logs = true

$ export STELA_SHOW_LOGS=true

If you want to manually update the stub file, please use the command stela gen-stub

$ stela gen-stub

If I cannot generate the stub?

Stela stills works normally, but IDE can't autocomplete the env object with the data received.

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For the next step, we will look at Stela default loader and how to use another source than dotenv files.