diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 43054f5..5a3d8f9 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -47,4 +47,26 @@ QDRANT_CLUSTER=''
 QDRANT_COLLECTION_NAME='titan'
 TOKENIZER_FOLDER=''
 MODEL_FOLDER=''
+```
+ℹ️ **Note for production/docker container:**  
+`TOKENIZER_FOLDER` and `MODEL_FOLDER` are **only required for local development**.  
 
+When running the application in a **Docker container**, these variables are already set in the `Dockerfile` and do not need to be defined in your `.env` file.
+
+
+
+## 📥 NLTK Setup for Development
+
+If you are running the application in development mode for the first time, you need to manually download the NLTK resource required for sentence tokenization.
+
+### Run the following inside your virtual environment:
+```ini
+import nltk
+nltk.download('punkt_tab')
+```
+
+This will download the necessary model and store it on your local machine under:
+
+```
+~/nltk_data
+```
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/src/util/config.py b/src/util/config.py
index e1c8beb..654d679 100644
--- a/src/util/config.py
+++ b/src/util/config.py
@@ -1,12 +1,12 @@
 from dotenv import dotenv_values
 import os
+from pathlib import Path
 
+# load_dotenv("/home/user/recommender-service-flask/src/.env")
 
-# load_dotenv("/home/charlenewsl/recommender-service-flask/src/.env")
-
-# config = dotenv_values("/home/charlenewsl/recommender-service-flask/src/.env")
-
-config = dotenv_values(".env")
+# config = dotenv_values("/home/user/recommender-service-flask/src/.env")
+env_path = Path(__file__).resolve().parents[1]/ ".env"
+config = dotenv_values(env_path)
 
 
 def env(name, default=None, cast=None):