cypress-ld-control VS dotenv

I wrote a blog post about it “ Control LaunchDarkly From Cypress Tests” https://glebbahmutov.com/blog/cypress-and-launchdarkly/

My friend Gleb Bahmutov authored an excellent blog on testing LD with Cypress, there he revealed his new plugin cypress-ld-control. We used it in Effective Test Strategies for Front-end Applications using LaunchDarkly Feature Flags and Cypress. Part2: testing. The distinction here is using the plugin for a deployed service and the consequential test strategies.

The cypress-ld-control plugin utilizes cy.task, which allows node code to execute within Cypress context. Therefore we will not be able to use cypress.env.json to store these LD related environment variables locally.

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.