Setting Environment Variables for Node to retrieve

Question

I\'m trying to follow a tutorial and it says:

There are a few ways to load credentials.

1. Loaded from environment variables,

Answer 1

I highly recommend looking into the dotenv package.

https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv

It's kind of similar to the library suggested within the answer from @Benxamin, but it's a lot cleaner and doesn't require any bash scripts. Also worth noting that the code base is popular and well maintained.

Basically you need a .env file (which I highly recommend be ignored from your git/mercurial/etc):

FOO=bar
BAZ=bob

Then in your application entry file put the following line in as early as possible:

require('dotenv').config();

Boom. Done. 'process.env' will now contain the variables above:

console.log(process.env.FOO);
// bar

The '.env' file isn't required so you don't need to worry about your app falling over in it's absence.