Vue-cli 3 Environment Variables all undefined

I've tried all of the solutions out there but none seem to work for me. I just want to store some values in a .env file within my Vue app but simply trying to log process.env returns an empty object from within the component.

My .env file

VUE_APP_URL={api url}
VUE_APP_TOKEN={token}

My plan was to set these environment variables to data properties but it always returns undefined. If I do console.log(process.env.NODE_ENV) from webpack.config.js it will show that I'm in development but if I tried doing the same from within the component like

mounted() {
    this.$nextTick(() => {
      console.log(process.env.VUE_APP_URL);
    })
  }

It just returns undefined.

I figured it out - I had to install dotenv-webpack and initialize it in webpack.config.js which is odd because none of the docs stated that I needed to do so.