I want to deploy an Asp.NetCore MVC application to many environment (development, staging, production, pre-production...).
For that, i planned to use the environment variables and the different appsetting.{environment}.json to configure the different connexion strings for each environment.
My problem is that I have multiple production environments, so how can I differenciate each configuration.
Thanks in advance.
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I am working on a NodeJS application which is a containerized application. I use Jenkins to build and deploy it. I have an environment .env file and along with this, also have .env files based on environments.
For example: .env.DEV, .env.SQA, .env.STG and .env.PROD.
Each file has different values for the variables based on environments.
When I am deploying my application, it always fetches variables from the .env file instead of specific environment file i.e. .env.DEV (if deploying on DEV server).
How do we use specific environment file while doing the deployment on Jenkins?
Note - I followed this great content on dotenv library but I didn't find anything helpful for my use-case. I even Googled a lot but didn't find much on this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You can use dotenv-flow which does exactly this, given the value of NODE_ENV environment value it will load the expected environment.
You also will need to make sure that the container receives the proper environment values from jenkins, this might help.
I am building a web application that utilises environment variables locally, and I want to put this on production (online). I am trying to find out how to set environment variables on AWS.
This is a node.js application and I am using elastic beanstalk on AWS for deployment. I have looked through https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloud9/latest/user-guide/env-vars.html#env-vars-env-list , but I'm unsure of which option applies to me.
The .env file I have locally contains lines like
PASSWORD=MYPASSWORD
and I am using the dotenv package, with require('dotenv').config(); in the appropriate files. I am accessing environment variables in my code through things like process.env.PASSWORD (using the aforementioned example of a line in the .env file).
I've tried searching several places and am presented with various options, but I'm not sure which one applies to my environment variables.
The link you are following may help you in ec2 machine that is mangages by you, but if you are working Elasticbeanstalk I will recommend using Environment variable configuration provided by elasticbeanstalk.
I am not in favour of .env in case of Elasticbeanstalk, ECS and many other services where AWS provide easy and out of the box feature to set environment variable in the configuration and .env write environment to file which is less secure then system environment variable.
The interesting part of Elasticbeanstalk ENV is, the system environment variable has higher periphery then .env environment variable but better to not place dotenv on elasticbeanstalk.
Environment Properties and Other Software Settings
You can use environment properties to pass secrets, endpoints, debug
settings, and other information to your application. Environment
properties help you run your application in multiple environments for
different purposes, such as development, testing, staging, and
production.
elasticbeanstalk-deploy_nodejs
Example .ebextensions/options.config
option_settings:
aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment:
API_ENDPOINT: www.example.com/api
Now all you need
var endpoint = process.env.API_ENDPOINT
Environment Properties
The Environment Properties section lets you specify environment
configuration settings on the Amazon EC2 instances that are running
your application. These settings are passed in as key-value pairs to
the application.
Inside the Node.js environment running in AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you
can access the environment variables using process.env.ENV_VARIABLE
similar to the following example.
var endpoint = process.env.API_ENDPOINT
I develop an application with nodejs and react. I use dotenv for configuration in my different environment.
I use TFS 2017 for build and release my application.
What is the best practise for add my .env file of production environment?
Production configs can be difficult to maintain. You can use any module or even write your own custom module to load environment variable in to your application.
However, maintaining production .env files locally for each product (i.e. committing them or putting them inside your docker image is a bad idea. If you ever happen to change some of those configs, you will have to manually change in the code for each application, build docker image (if required) and redeploy. If there are just a couple of applications, it might be easy. But if the number of related applications grow in size (as usually happens in case of microservice based architecture) - all of them sharing credentials, ips for database connections etc. it becomes a hectic task to manually change code and redeploy all the applications.
Usually, developers tend to keep a central repository of all credentials and environment variables. For examples, AWS offers parameter store and MS Azure offers Azure Key vault. In such a case, all the parameters are fetched during start time, and all we have to do is restart the application.
So usually people set only one global varibale NODE_ENV (as prod or dev), dynamically fetch all environment variables based on NODE_ENV running something like env $(node read-env-variables.js) node app.js.
I have an Angular4 web app, deployed on Azure. Now I want to deploy this app to other environments on Azure: one for testing, one for acceptance and one for production. Every environment has different API endpoints and may have other variables, like Application Insights. All those environments run Angular in production mode.
The way Angular advises you to do this, is by the Enviroment files (environment.test.ts, enviroment.acc.ts, environment.prod.ts). I could configure all the different API endpoints in those files, and run my build with --prod for production for example.
But that is not the way I want to do this. I want to use the exact same application package deployed to test for my acceptance environment, without rebuilding the project. In Visual Studio Online, this is also really simple to configure.
The point is: how can I make my API endpoints differ per environment in that way?
The way I want to do this, is by the App Settings in Azure. But Angular can't get to those environment variables because it's running on the client side. Node.js is running on serverside and could get those App Settings - but if that's the way I need to do it, how do I make Node.js (used in Angular4 CLI) to send those server variables to the client side? And what about performance impact for this solution?
How did you fix this problem for your Angular4 apps on Azure? Is it just impossible to fix this problem with the Azure App Settings?
For everyone with the same question: I didn't fix this problem the way I described above.
At the end, I did it the way Angular wants you to do it: so rebuild for dev, rebuild for acc and rebuild for prod.
In Visual Studio Online, at build time, it builds and tests our code and it saves the uncompiled/unminified code. At release time, it builds en tests it again and releases it to the right environment with the right environment variables (--prod for example).
I don't think there is another way to fix this.
The solution is pretty old school but it works! Although you can use branching or tag for this purpose instead of cloning the code to the package.
The best solution as you said is Azure app settings will be saved as environment variable so you should implement an API with node.js and share the variables you want.
Of course there is an impact because of additional http call, but it's just one time at application start which is about max 5ms and depends on each program policy whether is impact or not.
Another option could be move the variables to the JSON file in the asset folder, and change it at deploy runtime with release pipeline. that's easier implementation but the disadvantage is you will have to use release variables instead of app settings and if you have config changes you will have to update the variable value first and redeploy it, although that works most of the times but sometimes you want to change just like a connection string and you will have to redeploy.
It seems that my workflow would be improved if I had some way to automatically manage my environment variables so I can have different sets load automatically depending on if the server is running locally or running on Heroku.
What are my choices? Heroku must be using something on their end, because there are variable like local.env.PORT. What are they using? I was thinking that maybe if I use the same thing it would be easier.
I believe you can use the Foreman ruby gem with Heroku even if you are deploying apps using Node.js.
Foreman allows you to specify different application configurations on your local and remote application servers. I use it to control and manage my workers, web instances on Heroku for my rails apps.
Here's a link to a Heroku page showing how to manage environment variables using foreman:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/config-vars
You're looking for something like figaro which is quite useful. There is a node-figaro project inspired by figaro, but the docs are unclear on how to actually use the project to initialize environment variables.