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Is it possible to set a Heroku environment variable without restarting the app?
My app connects out to different online services via OAuth2. For each service I connect to, I need to set an OAuth2 ID and secret. To keep these configuration variables outside of my code, I'm using environment variables, and reading them in on process.env (node.js).
Each time I add a new service to my app, I need to add the corresponding environment variables for the ID and secret. I need to do this before pushing the latest code, so that when the app next starts up with the new service connection, the OAuth2 ID and secret variables are available.
Currently my workflow is as follows:
heroku config:set <SERVICE>_ID=foo <SERVICE>_SECRET=bar
git push heroku master
Currently, both of these operations will restart the app. I'd really prefer the first operation to not restart the app, as the changes to these config vars don't need to take effect until step 2). By restarting at step 1) my app will experience unnecessary downtime.
So, is there any way to prevent step 1) from restarting the app?
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env file on Heroku isn't a good approach. Instead, you can use its built-in support for environment variables, using heroku config:set <var> <value> or its web UI. Either way, you'll get a regular environment variable. But for testing these config vars in local, we need to set up a .
Heroku config vars are designed to be safe for storing sensitive information. All config vars are stored in an encrypted form and safely stored. These are only decrypted and loaded when booting your app in a dyno itself.
Accessing config var values from code Config vars are exposed to your app's code as environment variables. For example, in Node. js you can access your app's DATABASE_URL config var with process.
The . env file contains the individual user environment variables that override the variables set in the /etc/environment file. You can customize your environment variables as desired by modifying your . env file.
According to this article it pretty explicitly states that
Whenever you set or remove a config var, your app will be restarted.
Personally I also wish there was a way to do what you're asking. On larger apps, a system-wide hard restart can be painful when you have many process types running. Many times I set environment variables that aren't crucial for the app to grab ahold of immediately, such as that involving future functionality, or settings that are OK having the old value but you want the new value to take effect in a rolling-restart fashion.
183
At the present, is not possible to avoid the app restart. But you can use the command heroku config:edit to edit your env at once or even paste a new env set, avoiding many restarts.
In according to the heroku config help:
(...)
COMMANDS
config:edit interactively edit config vars
config:get display a single config value for an app
config:set set one or more config vars
config:unset unset one or more config vars
So you can run
heroku config:edit
Additionally, you might want to take a look on this issue (proposal): https://github.com/heroku/cli/issues/1570
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