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Social Media Backend uses pydantic-settings to load all runtime configuration from environment variables or a .env file placed in the project root (the directory containing pyproject.toml). Every variable listed below is required — the application calls Settings() at import time and will raise a ValidationError and refuse to start if any variable is absent or incorrectly typed.

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Environment file template

Copy the block below into a file named .env in the project root and fill in your values before starting the server.
.env
DATABASE_HOSTNAME=localhost
DATABASE_PORT=5432
DATABASE_PASSWORD=your_password
DATABASE_USERNAME=postgres
DATABASE_NAME=social_media
SECRET_KEY=your_super_secret_key_here
ALGORITHM=HS256
ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRE_MINUTES=60
Never commit .env to source control. The file contains your database credentials and JWT signing secret. Add .env to your .gitignore immediately.
echo ".env" >> .gitignore

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Variable reference

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Database connection

The application constructs the SQLAlchemy connection URL internally from the five individual database variables below. There is no DATABASE_URL variable in the Settings class — do not set one in your .env file. 
postgresql://{DATABASE_USERNAME}:{DATABASE_PASSWORD}@{DATABASE_HOSTNAME}:{DATABASE_PORT}/{DATABASE_NAME}

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JWT authentication

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How settings are loaded

The Settings class in app/config.py inherits from pydantic_settings.BaseSettings. At startup, pydantic-settings reads variables from the process environment first, then falls back to the .env file declared in the inner Config class: 
from pydantic_settings import BaseSettings

class Settings(BaseSettings):
    database_hostname: str
    database_port: str
    database_password: str
    database_username: str
    database_name: str
    secret_key: str
    algorithm: str
    access_token_expire_minutes: int

    class Config:
        env_file = ".env"

settings = Settings()
The module-level settings singleton is imported throughout the application (e.g. in database.py and oauth2.py), so it is evaluated once at import time. Any missing or mis-typed variable causes an immediate startup failure with a descriptive validation error.
In production (e.g. Render, Railway, Fly.io), set these variables as platform-level environment variables rather than deploying a .env file. Process environment variables always take precedence over the .env file, so the same Settings class works in both local and deployed environments without any code changes.

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