dotenv VS axios

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.

Typically, there are various ways to choose an HTTP client, and for this example, I've chosen axios.

axios: To fetch data from the Strapi CMS API and also to fetch responses from our Express server.

Note, you can use any library for HTTP requests like axios. This example uses the http and node-fetch libraries available on npm.

Interact with other APIs over an encrypted channel. For example, you can use Axios with Node.js.

For this article, I will be using the TypeScript Starter template as shown in the screenshot above. This comes with Nodejs, Cheerio, Axios

Axios is suitable for a wide range of web development projects, from simple single-page applications (SPAs) to complex, large-scale enterprise software.

Axios for streamlined API interactions, facilitating seamless data fetching.

Axios is a popular HTTP client library for Node.js that provides a more user-friendly and feature-rich way to make HTTP requests. Axios simplifies error handling and supports features like automatic JSON parsing and request/response interceptors, making it a great choice for many HTTP request scenarios.

For this tutorial, we’re going to scan the file for malware using Verisys Antivirus API, and so we’ll add a package to make it easier to make external HTTP requests. Popular choices include Axios and node-fetch - for this article, we’ll use node-fetch

In the dynamic realm of JavaScript and front-end development, selecting the appropriate tool for HTTP requests is critical. Axios and Fetch stand out as two leading contenders, each offering distinct features and benefits. This article delves into their differences and practical applications, providing a comprehensive comparison.