{"id":4678,"date":"2016-07-13T12:32:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T12:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/?p=4678"},"modified":"2016-07-13T12:32:57","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T12:32:57","slug":"set-process-env","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/set-process-env\/","title":{"rendered":"How to set process.env"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Node, environment variables are exposed through &#8220;process.env&#8221;. This seems to be set-able for the current process, although these changes aren&#8217;t supposed to go out to the OS.<\/p>\n<p>Most applications use environment variables heavily during startup, as it lets you keep secrets out of the code<sup><a href=\"#footnote_0_4678\" id=\"identifier_0_4678\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-identifier-link\" title=\"https:\/\/devcenter.heroku.com\/articles\/config-vars\">1<\/a><\/sup>. <\/p>\n<p>If you want to set one of these when the application starts, you can set them in your package.json file &#8211; cross-env is made to work on both Linux, OS X, and Windows. &#8220;NODE_ENV&#8221; is used by the Express.js HTTP server (other values being &#8220;development&#8221; and &#8220;production&#8221;<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"javascript\">\n\"scripts\": {\n  \"test\": \"cross-env NODE_ENV=test karma start\",\n}\n<\/pre>\n<p>A good way to get more control over environment variables within the application is to switch to a utility like nconf<sup><a href=\"#footnote_0_4678\" id=\"identifier_1_4678\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-identifier-link\" title=\"https:\/\/devcenter.heroku.com\/articles\/config-vars\">1<\/a><\/sup>,  which lets you set up a hierarchical structure of where configuration comes from &#8211; the environment, local JSON, etc:<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"javascript\">\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<p>If you do this, you could make files like &#8220;production.secrets.json&#8221;, &#8220;development.secrets.json&#8221;, add these to .gitignore, and use them to store database passwords and the like.<\/p>\n<ol class=\"footnotes\"><li id=\"footnote_0_4678\" class=\"footnote\">https:\/\/devcenter.heroku.com\/articles\/config-vars<span class=\"footnote-back-link-wrapper\"> [<a href=\"#identifier_0_4678\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-back-link\">&#8617;<\/a>] [<a href=\"#identifier_1_4678\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-back-link\">&#8617;<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[302,387],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}