In Node, environment variables are exposed through “process.env”. This seems to be set-able for the current process, although these changes aren’t supposed to go out to the OS.<\/p>\n
Most applications use environment variables heavily during startup, as it lets you keep secrets out of the code1<\/a><\/sup>. <\/p>\n If you want to set one of these when the application starts, you can set them in your package.json file – cross-env is made to work on both Linux, OS X, and Windows. “NODE_ENV” is used by the Express.js HTTP server (other values being “development” and “production”<\/p>\n A good way to get more control over environment variables within the application is to switch to a utility like nconf1<\/a><\/sup>, which lets you set up a hierarchical structure of where configuration comes from – the environment, local JSON, etc:<\/p>\n If you do this, you could make files like “production.secrets.json”, “development.secrets.json”, add these to .gitignore, and use them to store database passwords and the like.<\/p>\n A discussion of how to use environment variables for storage of secrets in Node.js<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[302,387],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\"scripts\": {\n \"test\": \"cross-env NODE_ENV=test karma start\",\n}\n<\/pre>\n\nimport * as nconf from 'nconf';\n\nnconf.argv()\n .env()\n .file({ file: 'env.json' });\n\nconst secret = nconf.get('GOOGLE_SECRET')\n<\/pre>\n