Setting Up Env Variables#

📝 A sample of the .env file that will be created in this lesson can be found - here.
📝 This lesson's quiz can be found - here.
🗒️ Solutions for this lesson's quiz can be found - here.

In the last lesson, we hard-coded MongoDB environment configuration values directly into our code. We created a user variable, a userPassword variable, and a cluster variable in our src/database/index.ts file. We obtained the values of these variables directly from our MongoDB Atlas dashboard.

Having these database configuration values in our code is a bad idea for a couple of reasons.

• Database environment variables should be confidential so we should be wary of having our values publicly available especially if we start to consider pushing our source code to an online repository.

• As the name suggests, environment variables are for setting up our app's runtime environment. They don't have anything to do with our app's logic. What if we wanted to change our MongoDB's user password when our application has already been built? We would want to update the environment variable without having to go back into the source code and changing it. This will help limit the need to modify and redeploy an app due to changes in configuration data when an app is already deployed.

process and dotenv#

In Node, process is a global object with information about the currently running process. process.env is an object within process that contains information representative of the state of the Node environment. During runtime, the reference to an environment variable within process.env is replaced with the actual value of the variable.

Environment variables defined within process can be specified both in a development setting as well as in a production setting. The dotenv library is a popular package that helps load variables from a .env file for Node.js projects, which is helpful during development.

We'll head to the terminal and install the dotenv library as a development dependency. We'll also install the type declaration file of dotenv as a development dependency.

server $: npm install -D dotenv @types/dotenv

We're installing dotenv library as a devDependency since when we deploy our app, our cloud management solution - Heroku will automatically save environment variables defined in the dashboard into process.env. As a result, we won't need the dotenv library in our production code. However, if you choose to use another method to deploy your app that may require a .env file, you might need to install dotenv as a regular dependency!

With dotenv installed, we'll create a .env file in the root of our project directory.

server/

  // ...

  .env