What is the difference between source and export?

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When you source the file, the assignments will be set but the variables are not exported unless the allexport option has been set. If you want all the variables to be exported, it is much simpler to use allexport and source the file than it is to read the file and use export explicitly. In other words, you should do:

set -a
. file.txt

(I prefer . because it is more portable than source, but source works just fine in bash.)

Note that exporting a variable does not make it an environment variable. It just makes it an environment variable in any subshell.

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