Setting Local environment variables for development

You may wish to override the default settings for Voluntarily e.g for the location of the database, port and url address used etc.

The Voluntarily application gets all its settings from config.js

This initialises and exports a config structure like this:

"config": {
    "appName": "Voluntarily NZ",
    "serverPort": 3122,
    "databaseUrl": "mongodb://localhost/vly2",
    "jsonOptions": {
      "headers": {
        "Accept": "application/json",
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
      }
    },
    "auth": {
      "AUTH0_CLIENT_ID": "S4yd4VgZ92NIjhwO3vt4h0Gifb9mXv1k",
      "AUTH0_CLIENT_DOMAIN": "voluntarily.au.auth0.com"
    },
    "apiVersion": "v1",
    "SMTP_ID": "",
    "SMTP_PWD": "",
    "onlyEmailText": false,
    "appUrl": "http://localhost:3122"
  }

These are either hard coded or initialised from the Process.env environment variables with

a default value if not set in the env.

e.g databaseUrl: process.env.MONGODB_URI || `mongodb://localhost/${databaseName}

If you need to override any values for your local environment you can do so in the following ways:

Set on the command line

This is good for temporary one off calls

PORT=3123 npm run dev

Export into your environment

This will persist as long as your terminal window is open.

export PORT=3123

To undo use 'unset PORT'

Use a .env file.

Using a .env file is the easiest and safest way to setup a local environment.

.env

PORT=80
APP_URL=http://vly.myserver.local
MONGODB_URI=mongodb+srv://vly-client:AAAAAAAAAAAAAA@cluster0-kwmsu.mongodb.net/vly2-avw?retryWrites=true'
NODE_ENV=production

YOU MUST NOT COMMIT YOUR .ENV FILE TO THE GITHUB REPOSITORY AS THIS WILL POLLUTE EVERYONE ELSE'S ENVIRONMENT AND MAY RESULT IN THE PUBLISHING OF PRIVATE API KEYS.

List of Env Vars used

Var	Description	Default	Usage
APP_URL	The full hostname and port of the application.	https://localhost:3122	Used in reduxApi and apiCaller to tell the client side code the entry point for api calls. Used in outgoing emails to provide links back to the application
PORT	Port server will listen on	3122 (dev) 8080 (test)	Used in server.js as the port the server listens on. test uses a different port so it doesn't conflict with a locally running app
NODE_ENV	Tells express the node environment	development	set to 'test' for npm test, set to 'production' in production. Mainly used to comment out test or dev specific output Express uses NODE_ENV to alter its own default behavior. For example, in development mode, the default error handler will send back a stacktrace to the browser. In production mode, the response is simply `Internal Server Error`, to avoid leaking implementation details to the world.
SMTP_ID SMTP_PWD	Settings for the email SMTP server connection. AWS Specific	unset - must be set by user	used in email.js to init the AWS SES transport layer.
TEXT_ONLY_EMAIL	sets emails to send text only - no images	true	see emailperson.js

Conclusion

Environment variables exist outside our application's code, they are available where our application is running. They can be used to decouple our application's configuration from its code, which allows our apps to be easily deployed across different environments.

With Node.js apps, environment variables are available through the process.env global variable. We can set the environment variables before we run the node command, or we can use the dotenv library which allows us to define our environment variables in a .env file.

The .env file should never be in the source code repository.