Value Error: Unable to expand environment variable

[oceanKingEth]

Hello,
I am having difficulty connecting to the Rinkeby network through infura and brownie.
This happened at the end of lesson 4 and now lesson 5.
I am able to deploy and test on ganache, but never rinkeby.
I saw this problem come up on stack exchange and perhaps I need to upgrade versions of brownie? i have Brownie v1.14.4

I am confident I have the .env and brownie-config.yaml files set up correctly.

Thanks for helping

BrownieFundMeProject is the active project.
File "brownie/_cli/main.py", line 64, in main
importlib.import_module(f"brownie._cli.{cmd}").main()
File "brownie/_cli/run.py", line 43, in main
network.connect(CONFIG.argv["network"])
File "brownie/network/main.py", line 40, in connect
web3.connect(host, active.get("timeout", 30))
File "brownie/network/web3.py", line 51, in connect
uri = _expand_environment_vars(uri)
File "brownie/network/web3.py", line 171, in _expand_environment_vars
raise ValueError(f"Unable to expand environment variable in host setting: '{uri}'")
ValueError: Unable to expand environment variable in host setting: 'https://rinkeby.infura.io/v3/$WEB3_INFURA_PROJECT_ID'

[oceanKingEth]

I figured it out!!!!! Man, that took me hours. lol
i ended up using source .env in the terminal, seems to work now.

EDIT: This won't work for Windows, and means you'll have to run this everytime you start a project. Ideally you add dotenv: .env to your brownie-config.yaml and add your environment variables to a .env file.

[PatrickAlphaC]

That source .env trick will mean you have to do it everytime you close your terminal, and doesn't work for windows. So I'm wondering if I forgot to tell people to add .env to their brownie config?

[oceanKingEth]

you definetely showed us to add dotenv: .env to the config file, i'm not sure what happened there.
thanks for responding and for the course itself! i'm loving this already.

[cherb-programs]

Thanks guys, worked a treat.

[haraslub]

I have just faced to the same issue. Thank both of you @PatrickAlphaC and @oceanKingEth for the solution provided.

[cabelera42]

the timestamp is 7:54:13

the error first shows when running: brownie test -k test_get_entrance_fee --network rinkeby