Environment Variables

All system environment variables as well as any variables specified in a .env.local file in the root of your project directory will be available to your code under process.env.VAR_NAME.

Example

Your .env.local file would look something like this:

/.env.local

GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=1bc29b36f623ba82aaf6724fd3b16718OTHER_IMPORTANT_API_KEY=ca794fb2d950acf25c964ecc35f2d7e2... other values ...

These values can be accessed in your code on the process.env namespace:

const API_KEY = process.env.GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY

How to Use It Correctly

Keep your .env.local in your .gitignore file and not push it to source control.

Set environment variables in your CI/CD solution (e.g. Vercel, TeamCity) directly. Here's a guide on how to do that for TeamCity.

If you want your app to behave differently for each build environment, e.g. use a QA backend when doing QA tests, use an environment variable for it (BUILD_ENV for example). Set a different value for this environment variable for every build environment (BUILD_ENV=qa, BUILD_ENV=production, etc.).

Caveats

During compilation, chayns-toolkit will look at your source code and look for places where you access process.env. It will then match these places with the available environment variables and do a string replacement if it can find one.

In other words this means that you cannot access the variables with any other syntax. Only process.env.VAR_NAME will be replaced, but other syntax like const { VAR_NAME } = process.env will not be detected.