How to permanently set composer env variables in a .env file?

I'm using PHP composer to deal with env variables and I've set a few in a .env file. Composer recognizes it and adds them to $_ENV just fine.

However, is there a way to keep a synchronous relationship between $_ENV and .env file? This way composer would override the file with updated $_ENV information so I could use it afterwards.

Is it possible? Since $_ENV only keeps the actual variables per session. I'm asking this because I wanted to keep refreshing an API token in a file. I'd also appreciate if there's some workaround or if I actually didn't understand the concept properly.

source https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76176212/how-to-permanently-set-composer-env-variables-in-a-env-file