I'm trying to follow a tutorial and it says:
There are a few ways to load credentials.
- Loaded from environment variables,
- Loaded from a JSON file on disk,
The keys need to be as follows:
USER_ID, USER_KEY
...This means that if you properly set your environment variables, you do not need to manage credentials in your application at all.
Based on some Googling, it appears that I need to set the variables in process.env
? How and where do I set these credentials? Example Please.
Environment variables (in this case) are being used to pass credentials to your application. USER_ID
and USER_KEY
can both be accessed from process.env.USER_ID
and process.env.USER_KEY
respectively. You don't need to edit them, just access their contents.
It looks like they are simply giving you the choice between loading your USER_ID
and USER_KEY
from either process.env
or some specificed file on disk.
Now, the magic happens when you run the application.
USER_ID=239482 USER_KEY=foobar node app.js
That will pass the user id 239482
and the user key as foobar
. This is suitable for testing, however for production, you will probably be configuring some bash scripts to export variables.