Environment Variables in App Engine for local dev

Question

What's the best way to set environment variables when developing nodejs on a local machine for App Engine Flex environment? If they're set in app.yaml then they don't get set during local development. Is there a way to force this, or should I use something like dotenv and keep track of the same environment variables in 2 places?

Answer 1

Sensitive data (e.g. API Keys) should not be committed to source code.

The way I went around that is storing a .env file in Google Storage. Then you can use @google-cloud/storage to download it in production (using a prestart hook) and dotenv to load variables into memory.

You may find a full guide here: http://gunargessner.com/gcloud-env-vars/

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PS: I would go for Aidan's answer for storing any data that is not sensitive. I have myself used dotenv satisfactorily in the past. Similar to that, there's nconf, the package that gcloud itself uses for examples. Pretty neat!

Answer 2

Option 1:

require('dotenv').config({path: '/custom/project/root/app.yaml'})

Option 2:

Maintain both a .env file and a .yaml file with the same keys but different values (local and GAE, respectively). In app.yaml, I make sure not to deploy my .env file by adding the following line:

skip_files : .env

You will then need to add a check on ('dotenv').config() to make sure that it doesn't error or overwrite your process variables if no .env file is detected.