dotenv VS Figaro

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.

I've been a long time fan of Figaro, a great gem that lets your store your environment variables in /config/application.yml. I've used it in most of my Rails apps for two reasons. One, it lets you easily define variables for your for development, staging, production environments. Two, it works well with Heroku since they also use ENV for storing and accessing environment variables, so things work the same locally while developing as well as after it's been deployed. However the downside with Figaro is that all your environment variables are exposed to the outside world, which is problematic if your repo is open source.

In this post, I will go over the steps I took to authenticate to GitHub in a Rails development environment using the omniauth-github gem, "the official OmniAuth strategy for authenticating to GitHub", along with Devise, the figaro gem, and ngrok, a nifty tool that exposes your local WebHost to the internet. This guide will assume you already have Devise authentication setup for your app. See the link above for installation instructions.

figaro - for environment variables

https://github.com/laserlemon/figaro#example

You should not commit such credentials/secrets/environment variables to the Github instead you keep them secure with gems like dotenv-rails, figaro or simple dot files that are not committed to the repository.

Here, we are creating a service with private method connect_to_db that connects to our external mysql database. We are using following from application.yml: