Node - Managing Your Local Environment Variables With Dotenv

In your node projects, tired of fooling with your Terminal to set your local environment variables?

Try the dotenv package.

1.

Navigate, using your terminal, to the root directory of your project

2.

Type the following

    npm install dotenv --save

3.

Navigate to your startup file… ie, whatever file you use when you type node app.js, or node server.js

Type

    touch .env

so that the .env file will be in the same folder as your startup file

3.

You now have a .env file. Add it to your .gitignore file like so,

    /.env

otherwise you will upload it to github, which would put all your secrets info out in public.

4.

In your .env file, put your secret information like so. Note that quotes are not necessary.

    DB_USER=whatever
    DB_PASS=whatever
    DB_HOST=ds000000.mongolab.com:0000/whatever
    SUPERSECRET=987df87d9f87g9d8f7g98ds7f9g

5.

Add this line as early as possible to your main startup file.

`require('dotenv').load();`

Then, after you reboot your server, you can access those secret variables in your code like so

    // server.js
    var superSecret = process.env.SUPERSECRET;
    var mongoAddress = 'mongodb://'+
        process.env.DB_USER+':'+
        process.env.DB_PASS+'@'+
        process.env.DB_HOST;
    mongoose.connect(mongoAddress);