How to add .env to droplet?

I’ve been searching around for hours. I don’t want to add the .env to my git to get the .env on the server. I have installed Filezilla and tried to upload the .env that way, but permissions won’t let me do it. I also tried to make a new file on the ftp but that isn’t allowed either. I tried to do it in the console using “sudo vim .env” and pasting it in, but couldn’t get that to work. I have a lot of environment variables to add, how do I go about doing this? This is a mern app.