by Erisan Olasheni

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed custom environment variables for different development stages of your app? Here is a one-line solution.

Development has been much easier since the invention of the .env file. You can easily set your environment variables and values with the syntax ENV_VARIABLE=VALUE and boom! These variables got loaded as your environment variables, making it possible to get quick access to them:

In case you are still wondering what all this means, well, you are probably new to the .env file. It’s actually a simple configuration text file that is used to define some variables you want to pass into your application’s environment.

With Replit, you can create an.env file to safely store your secrets. This means you can safely share your code, without sharing your secrets.env Files.env files are used for declaring environment variables. On Replit,.env files are only visible to the owner of the repl.

Every time you start a shell session in Linux, the system goes through configuration files and sets up the environment accordingly. Environment variables play a significant role in this process. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set, view, and unset environment variables in Linux. In order to make use of.env files, you'll need a working instance of Docker and docker-compose. Declaring values in the.env file Within the.env file, you declare values for certain variables. The file option is interesting because it means you can also create an environment variable to launch a program. For example, you can point an environment variable to any EXE file on your system. When you invoke the variable, it will launch the program.

This file needs a something like a parser to make it work. The parser reads the variable definitions one-by-one and parses them to the environment. Dolby lake controller software mac. It uses the format ENV_VARIABLE=VALUE (in the case of Node.js: process.env[ENV_VARIABLE]=VALUE).

Of course, this is not a built-in feature in Node.js. You have to engineer it with a popular module called dotenv.

It’s a nice workaround, as it has really made development easier between co-developers and across the dev community as a whole. I personally had been using the dotenv module, until I got stranded trying to get a solution that could make me use a different configuration file for a particular environment. That would be even cooler…right? Yes! But unfortunately, the dotenvmodule doesn’t provide us with this goody.

So what’s next? We need this thing to make development and testing easier across different development stages!

How about custom .env files for different environment stages?

Don’t you think that would be a good solution? Defining custom environment variables by just creating a .env.envname file? Cool! That is what custom-env has come to do.

Custom env is a library built to make development easier by allowing multiple .env configuration for different environments. This is done by loading environment variables from a .env.envname file into the node’s process.env object.

Installation

Just grab it with the following command:

Usage

By default, custom-env picks the .env file for your dev stage. However, to customize for a different stage, add the name as a suffix as in .env.envname.

Example

Create .env File Python

We can define a custom environment variable for a staging development.

Create a .env.staging file
Define your variables

Access your variables

Expected Output

That’s it, pretty easy. Feel free to define more variables for different stages you think you have, like:

.env.testing, .env.staging, .env.server1, .env.server2, .env.localhost

Set to the Current Environment

You can tell custom-env to use a configuration that matches your current development stage by passing trueto the env()method.

Example

File: index.js

Now let’s define a staging configuration file:

File: .env.staging

Now let’s serve node with the staging environment:

Expected Output

There you go!

Full Documentation

For the full documentation of custom-env, visit the npm pagehttps://www.npmjs.com/package/custom-env

Source Code

You can get or contribute to the custom-envsource code at https://github.com/erisanolasheni/custom-env

Happy Coding!

GitHub Action

Use latest version

Create .env file

Github Action to create a .env file with Github Secrets

Installation

Copy and paste the following snippet into your .yml file.

Learn more about this action in SpicyPizza/create-envfile

Choose a version

SpicyPizza/create-envfile@v1.1

About

A Github Action to create a .env file with Github Secrets. This is useful whenyou are creating artifacts that need to contain secrets stored in GithubSecrets. This creates a file with variables that are defined in the Actionconfig.

Usage

The Action looks for environment variables that start with envkey_ and createsan envfile with them. These are defined in the with section of the Actionconfig. Here is an example of it in use:

Create .env File Windows

Inputs

In the example above, there are several key/value pairs that will be added tothe envfile:

Name	Description
`envkey_DEBUG`, `envkey_SOME_API_KEY`	These values can be whatever, and they will be added to the envfile as `DEBUG` and `SOME_API_KEY` .
`envkey_SECRET_KEY`	This one will use a secret stored in the repository's Github Secrets, and add it to the file as `SECRET_KEY`
`directory` (Optional)	This key will set the directory in which you want to create `env` file. (Action will fail if the specified directory doesn't exist.)
`file_name` (Optional)	Set the name of the output envfile. Defaults to `.env`

Assuming that the Github Secret that was used is password123, the .env filethat is created from the config above would contain:

Potential Issues

Warnings

Create .env File Linux

When the Action runs, it will show Warning: Unexpected input(s) ... This isbecause Github is expecing all the potential input variables to be defined bythe Action's definition. You can read more about it in thisissue.

Contributors

React Env File

Categories

Links

SpicyPizza/create-envfile Open issues 1 Pull requests 1 Report abuse

Create .env file is not certified by GitHub. It is provided by a third-party and is governed by separate terms of service, privacy policy, and support documentation.

Create An Env File