typescript-starter VS dotenv

Let's say you want to create a new NestJS standard application from scratch but taking the full control of your dependencies, scripts and source code. Thus, you don't want to use the usual npx @nestjs/cli new command (which basically bootstraps the typescript starter project) since you wish a bare minimum app.

You don't need to use the Nest CLI if you don't want to. You can literally just create a index.ts file, use NestJS within it and run it with ts-node index.ts (though you gotta make sure you have the correct tsconfig.json)

Another option is to clone the starter repo from GitHub. Note that to install the JavaScript flavor of the starter project, we can clone this repo, but you’ll need Babel to compile vanilla JavaScript).

git clone https://github.com/nestjs/typescript-starter.git project cd project yarn yarn add -D prisma npx prisma init

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.