Settings from .env file not overriding the default

[rsamf]

I have my settings class configured to load environment variables from a .env file, but the values from the .env file aren't overriding the default. I have a minimal example below:

from pydantic import Field
from pydantic_settings import BaseSettings, SettingsConfigDict

class Settings(BaseSettings):
    """Application settings with environment variable support."""
    model_config = SettingsConfigDict(
        env_file='.env', 
        env_file_encoding='utf-8',
    )
    
    # Application settings
    app_name: str = Field(default="foo", alias="APP_NAME")

settings = Settings()
print(settings.app_name) # always prints "foo"

In my .env file:

APP_NAME="bar"

[rsamf]

TIP:

To get me to proceed further, I have debugged the issue and made changes to my local pydantic_settings dependency.

At this line,
https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-settings/blob/50dedf7bbb18892f0ac46e79d85330e921cef614/pydantic_settings/main.py#L429C1-L430C1

I resolved it on my end by swapping the parameters (i.e. deep_update(state, source_state)) because my env variables from the .env file was being replaced by the original settings and not the other way around.

[hramezani]

The environment variable has priority over the dotenv file.

You can change the sources priority as well. take a look at the doc

[rsamf]

Okay, but shouldn't dotenv variables take priority over the default?

[hramezani]

No, the values that you provide in the settings initialization have the top priority. but still you can change the priority as you want