dotenv VS Nodemon.io

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.

nodemon - enables automatic reload of your server after code change docs

Then, install nodemon (in the VSCode terminal also), which, to my understanding, automatically refreshes the server you'll be sending requests to, whenever you make a change. Using plain node.js, you'd have to manually stop and restart the server after every change.

That's already pretty good, but as you already know it's a PITA to work with this during development. You will have to rebuild your Docker images whenever you change your code, even though your apps will probably support hot-reloading out of the box (or with something like Nodemon if not).

Are you moving your projects to use ES Modules but you are facing some unexpected issues? You are not alone in this fight. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up nodemon along with ts-node.

We can now use npm run dev to start the server using nodemon, which enables hot refreshing on changes.

Welcome to my blog, where we dive into the intriguing world of Node.js development and tackle one of the common stumbling blocks many developers encounter: the "Nodemon Error - nodemon.ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system." If you've ever come across this error while working with Nodemon, fear not! In this article, we will explore the causes behind this issue, understand why scripts are disabled on certain systems and most importantly, provide you with practical solutions to overcome this obstacle and keep your development workflow seamless. So, let's embark on this troubleshooting journey together and empower ourselves to conquer the Nodemon Error!

You’ll need to restart the server using node index.js whenever you change any project file. You can also use Nodemon to automate this.

nodemon will be required to monitor for any changes in our source code and automatically restart our server.