importing env variable react front end

Question

I have bootstrapped an app using create-react-app. I have a token that I don't wish to push to GitHub.

I have ran yarn add dontenv and then tried to import the env variable to my App.js file.

My code looks like this

.env

TOKEN=**************

Then my app.js file looks like this:

app.js

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
require('dotenv').config();

const App = props => {
    console.log(process.env.token);
    return <p>Test</p>
}

process.env.token is undefined. Can anyone advise how to use token in the front end or how I should do this using a bootstrapped create-react-app?

Answer 1

You don't need dotenv (and I doubt that library will work at runtime in a client-side application anyway).

create-react-app actually provides this functionality out of the box, assuming you're using [email protected] or higher.

The steps are as follows:

• Create a .env file in the root of your project.
• Add a variable, starting with the prefix REACT_APP_.
• Access it via process.env.

That second bit is the important part - to avoid you exposing variables by accident, create-react-app forces you to use a prefix as a way of saying "yes, I know what I'm doing".

If you're not intending to push the file to source control (which you shouldn't be, if it's got secret keys in!), then using an .env.local file is more idiomatic - that requires [email protected] or higher, though.

Answer 2

for anybody that does not get this to work, try this

if you want git to ignore it you can create a .env.local file and git will ignore it. Look at your .gitignore file and you will find the `.env.local``

1. create .env.local file in your root folder
2. Open your .env.local
3. IMPORTANT, all your environment variables MUST start with REACT_APP_
4. Create an environment variables REACT_APP_BASE_URL
5. Restart your application (kill it)
6. To access environment variables you write process.env.REACT_APP_BASE_URL