@BrutalBirdie yes, I think that needs to be fixed. Obviously, nothing is right/wrong, but this is just a convention to guide people and makes support simpler. The convention is: If the app uses environment variables, just use env.sh pattern and expect people to add export keyword. A motivation for this is that in many app doc pages, they have export and people copy/paste it. If the app uses .env , dotenv and other styles, just use env. Same rationale as above. Use dot files in /app/data only for package internal files. Do not use for app files. For example, it would be htaccess and not .htaccess if needed in /app/data/ . But, we use .initialized since it's a package thing and not related to the app. Any deviation from above is mostly just oversight...