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!
![Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools]()
MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does. Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up. I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own. In any event...
![How to Create a Twitter Card]()
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
![Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using Dojo]()
The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below:
Here's how to accomplish this same effect using Dojo.
The XHTML
The above HTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes.
The CSS
The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...
![MooTools Zebra Tables Plugin]()
Tabular data can oftentimes be boring, but it doesn't need to look that way! With a small MooTools class, I can make tabular data extremely easy to read by implementing "zebra" tables -- tables with alternating row background colors.
The CSS
The above CSS is extremely basic.
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;