dotenv VS create-react-app

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.

Immerse yourself in the official Create React App documentation for a deeper understanding.

Create React App (https://create-react-app.dev/)

- And ofc, there are some templates/frameworks that bring something of that together (https://create-react-app.dev/; maybe https://vitejs.dev/) - google for templates.

I recommend finding some friend with modern experience or at least some youtube tutorials or at least some learning course. That would help you to catch up on the best way to bootstrap your first project. Then you can practice.

What's the connection?

Also, take a look at this response from 2021: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/discussions/117...

Create React App Documentation

Inside the react-tutorial-app folder, to create a new React project runs the following command using create-react-appand for more details on how create-react-app works and other staff, please visit the official website: https://create-react-app.dev/

Before we embark on our journey, make sure you have React installed and a React project set up. If not, fear not! Create React App is your trusty sidekick for a quick start.

create-react-app -> Building a single-page application. Good for beginners.