dotenv VS cross-env

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv

cross-env

or if we care about cross-platform compatibility (i.e. Windows support), we can use cross-env (which I also recommend to install as a dev dependency):

i like to use dotenv-flow and dynamically load it into node process. it's framework agnostic and can be combined with vaious other strategies, like explicitly set NODE_ENV with cross-env. all you need is the right command in your package.json, see a sample here.

Cross-env runs scripts that set and use environment variables across various platforms.

You will also need to disable the url-loader in your Docusaurus build which transforms images into base64 strings, as this will conflict with the plugin. There isn't a first class way to do this in Docusaurus at present. However by setting the environment variable WEBPACK_URL_LOADER_LIMIT to 0 you can disable it. You can see an implementation example in this pull request. It amounts to adding the cross-env package and then adding the following to your package.json:

Using the cross-env library, you'll tell the React Testing Library to skip auto cleanup after each test. More info and ways to configure here: Skipping Auto Cleanup. Now your configuration is enough to start writing tests, let's get started.

Now we need to load the files during the bootup. Windows environments sometimes face issues with loading the environments. To take care of that, let's install a package named cross-env

build; sets and enviroment valiable of NODE_ENV=production using cross-env lib and builds the production bundle, minified and without source-maps as set in the webpack.config.js file.

I'd suggest the cross-env NPM package which is used a lot (4M downlaods/week). Then you can just change it to the following:

Debugging Cypress tests using Visual Studio Code was possible earlier but with the latest version of Cypress, there is no direct way to do so. Even with the latest version of Cypress, a workaround was possible using Debugger for Chrome – a Visual Studio Code Extension and cross-env npm package. However, the Debugger for Chrome Extension for Visual Studio Code is deprecated and the cross-env npm package has gone into maintenance mode.