Backpack VS dotenv

I'm new to Next.js and I'm having some trouble running the frontend of Backpack. I get the following error message:

You can read a little about environment variables here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_variable. After reading about environment variables, the error is pretty straightforward: it tried to read the value of the environment variable PORT but it couldn't find it. To make managing these environment variables convenient, the project uses a dotenv inspired solution, where the environment variables are defined in an .env file which is then read by the program. The repository contains an example of such a file: https://github.com/JSH32/Backpack/blob/master/.env.example. You can get started by renaming it into .env and going through the file, filling in any missing values like the one for DATABASE_URL.

Here's a link to the Backpack repo

We will put our Emailjs environment variables in a dotenv (.env) file. To read more about the purpose of this file click here.

Add .env to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being committed. Here's an example file with it already added. You may also use dotenv for advanced configuration and it will automatically load environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

dotenv: Designed to load environment variables from a .env file into the process.env environment

Like Doppler, Infisical uses environment variable injection. Similar to the Dotenv package for Node, when used in Node, it injects them at run time into the process object of the running app so they're not readable by any other processes or users. They can still be revealed by a crash dump or logging, so that is a caveat to consider in your code and build scripts.

We'll be working with databases' ids and different info that should be secured so I would advise you to create a .env file to store said info. We'll do this by installing dotenv into our project and use it accordingly:

dotenv - For reading our API keys from the environment

As an avid dotenv user I wanted to thank their maintainers for keeping the project alive for 10 years (wow). A perfect exemplary of dedication to Open Source.

Sensitive data like database URLs, API keys, and passwords should never be hardcoded in your application code. Instead, use environment variables accessed at runtime to keep this information secret. Popular dotenv libraries like dotenv make this easy for Node.js apps.