Reading environment variable from beanstalk for reactjs web app

Question

I have a problem which seemed to be trivial at the beginning but now I am getting that it is very confusing.

So I am using reactjs for the front end of my application. I deploy my reactjs web app in a beanstalk in aws. In the beanstalk I define an environment variable called test and now I wanna read that and use it in my react application. But the problem is my react application is basically a client script in users browser so I cannot do something like this:

const config = {};

  config.db = {
  test: process.env.DB_DATABASE || 'my_db',
};

which is suggested in that link.

https://alexdisler.com/2016/03/26/nodejs-environment-variables-elastic-beanstalk-aws/

So I am doubting this is doable at all or it is something that is not possible.? any idea would be appreciated

Answer 1

Your react code will run in the browser, and will not be able to access the environment variables that have been set on the server.

The link you provided describes the process to set environment variables in a node.js environment that is hosted on an elastic beanstalk instance.

I suggest creating a config file in your react application that stores necessary parameters and initial settings you need to run your app.