Best place to store environment variables for Azure Function

Question

I'm testing an azure function locally with several api keys. Whats the best place to store environment variables and how do I access them? I tried

System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("name")}

but I'm not sure where the environment variable is stored.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should have a file called local.settings.json. Here is the azure website for Functions-Run-Local

It states

These settings can also be read in your code as environment variables. In C#, use System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable or ConfigurationManager.AppSettings. In JavaScript, use process.env. Settings specified as a system environment variable take precedence over values in the local.settings.json file.

example local.settings.json

{
  "IsEncrypted": false,   
  "Values": {
    "AzureWebJobsStorage": "<connection string>", 
    "AzureWebJobsDashboard": "<connection string>" 
  },
  "Host": {
    "LocalHttpPort": 7071, 
    "CORS": "*" 
  },
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "SQLConnectionString": "Value"
  }
}

It says that you need to put the application settings under the Values property within the local.settings.json.

To retrieve I used ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["CustomSetting"] as it lets you retrieve connection strings.

I have just been playing around with this and discovered that you have to have a a string key and a string value. I got an error when I tried having a subsection (like you would in an appsettings.json). I had to have the local.settings.json look like this:

{
  "IsEncrypted": false,   
  "Values": {
    "AzureWebJobsStorage": "<connection string>", 
    "AzureWebJobsDashboard": "<connection string>" 
    "CustomSetting":"20"
  }
}