Get and Set Environment Variables in Node.js
One of the best ways to use sensitive information in open source repositories without hard-coding the information within publicly available repositories is setting environment variables. Set the environment variables on the server, retrieve them by key within your application.
When using Node.js, you can retrieve environment variables by key from the process.env object:
var mode = process.env.mode; // 'PRODUCTION', for example
var apiKey = process.env.apiKey; // '38294729347392432'
There are time when you may want to set environment variables while you run your node app -- these are set temporarily while the process is still running. A common case is simulating environment variables during testing. You can temporarily set these variables by pegging items onto the process.env object:
process.env.mode = 'TESTING';
// Now app code knows not to do destructive transactions!
Simple enough but worth documenting for future use!
![9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us. Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos. Another technology available...
![Facebook Open Graph META Tags]()
It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites. Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly. And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website. One...
![Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP]()
I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram's iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and...
![Scroll IFRAMEs on iOS]()
For the longest time, developers were frustrated by elements with overflow not being scrollable within the page of iOS Safari. For my blog it was particularly frustrating because I display my demos in sandboxed IFRAMEs on top of the article itself, so as to not affect my site's...
I believe it’s more common to use
process.env.NODE_ENVinstead ofprocess.env.modeThis is an interesting problem. What if you are using aws or heroku for hosting? You could have your deployment script setup the keys, but you’d need to prompt each time you create a new instance.
I encrypted the keys in a json file with AES 256 and in my run/deploy script it prompts for a password and decrypts it running the rest of the application with env variables. It’s not perfected yet, but this might be a good way to put it on github.
Are these variables just being set via the command line?
Yep!
I have had great success with json-configurator (https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-configurator). Use it with
process.env.NODE_ENVas a input.require('json-configurator')(configJson, process.env.NODE_ENV ).userEndpoint;