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RAN!

Environment Variables

One of the best ways to use sensitive information is setting environment variables. Even in open source repositories without hard-coding the information within publicly available repositories, It's more important. Set your environment variable by using .env files, then you can use it on your application. On Node.js applications, Dotenv module is the easiest way to store/retrieve environment variables. It's a zero dependency module and simple to use. For access to these variables client-side dotenv-webpack has been added which only exposes variables that are used by your front-end pages.

How can we use?

Just rename ".env-sample" file to ".env" to use your environment variables.

Example

On The Server

Sample .env file

PORT=3000
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PASSWORD=password123

On your application, you can access these values by using process.env.

process.env.PORT
process.env.DB_HOST
process.env.DB_PASSWORD

For more info, please click here to check dotenv repo

On The Client

Sample public.env file

[email protected]

On your application, you can access these values by using process.env.

process.env.EMAIL

On any of your client-side scripts, you can access your environment variables similarly

export default (props) => (
  <div>My email is {process.env.EMAIL}</div>
);

For more info, please click here to check dotenv-webpack repo

Tips

  • Do not commit the ".env" file to any repository, .gitignore file has a definition for that. If you commit, It can possibly create security flaw on your application.
  • If you are deploying to Zeit Now, in addition to dotenv, use Now Secrets. Zeit's OSS plan makes the source of your app available to the public and sensitive information in ".env", "now.json" or other files may be exposed.

Shared Variables between Client and Server

  • Use public.env to store non-sensitive variables for the client. These variables will be used and exposed to the client so be sure they are safe to expose.
  • The variables in public.env and .env are merged and loaded on the server. Keep in mind that if a variable is defined in both files, .env variables will take precedence.