Setting Up a NodeJs Server

In this tutorial, we will show how you can use Onboardbase to manage the environment variables your NodeJs Server Application depends on.

The most popular way of doing this in NodeJs is by creating a .env file in your project code and then using a NodeJs package like dotenv which will load the environment variables into the process.env.

With a setup like this, if multiple people work on a project, they will need to each have a copy of the .env file, and they must all be aware of updates made by any member of the team and update their local .env files.

This becomes more difficult as the number of people working on the project increases. And since applications are going to run in different environments that require different environment variables throughout their life cycle - development, staging, or production environment, each environment must use the right environment variables. It will be disastrous if the production application uses the development environment variables.

Managing Environment Variables with Onboardbase

Onboardbase is an all-in-one SecretOps infrastructure for securing environment configs/secret credentials across all stages, from development to production. It's designed for modern dev teams with rapidly changing requirements in collaborative environments.

Let's see how we can use Onboardbase to manage the environment variables for a NodeJs application. We will create a very simple NodeJs Express application for the purpose of this tutorial

Create a new folder for the demo project and open up your terminal in that folder. And run the following commands sequentially:

yarn init -y

yarn add express

After executing the commands, create an index.js file with the following content:

const express = require("express");
const app = express();

app.get("/", (req, res) => {
  res.send("GET request to the homepage");
});

const port = process.env.PORT;
if (!port) {
  throw Error("You must set a Port for the App to Run");
}

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Example app listening on port ${port}`);
});

This simple Express server depends on the PORT environment variable to be available on process.env.PORT before the server can start.

The current folder structure should look like this:

Try to run the project by executing

node index.js

This should fail since the PORT environment variable is not available to the NodeJS process

Setting Up An Onboardbase Project

You must have installed the Onboardbase CLI and Signed Up with us to continue with this section.

After you are signed in to Onboardbase, you need to create a Project if you don't have one already.

Click Create your first project, it should bring up this page where you can fill in information about your new project. Click Create when you are done filling in the project details

The next step is to set up your environments and your environment variables:

We will be sticking with the development environment name to start with, we can add more environments later on. Click on Variables to add environment variables:

I have added a PORT environment variable and my value is 8080. The values are hidden by default, but you can click on show to reveal them. Click Save to save the environment variable.

After saving, you should be taken to the project overview page:

You can see the environment we have currently and the variables in it.

Let's now setup up Onboardbase CLI in the codebase.

Still in the terminal, run onboardbase login. Select Yes and a browser tab will open for you to login in.

After you log in on the browser, you should be authenticated on the CLI.

Run onboardbase setup which will list all the Projects you have on Onboardbase

After selecting a Project, you are also prompted to set an environment:

After selecting the development environment, you should have the following view

A new file is also added to the project source by the Onboardbase CLI

Now execute

onboardbase run 'node index.js'

This should output:

Yay

We are now managing our environment variables using Onboardbase

If you have a start script that starts your application, you can pass that to onboardbase run instead.

To demonstrate this, I have added this start script to my package.json

...  
"scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
 },
...
  

Now I can execute onboardbase run 'yarn start' to start the application

Conclusion

This tutorial shows how Onboardbase can help us manage the environment and environment variables that a NodeJs Application requires.

We also mentioned that Onboardbase makes it easy for teams to collaborate on projects. To share environment configs among team members, we need to add them to the Onboardbase Project, and they will be able to access the configs for that project.