node-api-without-dependencies VS dotenv

To support different REST endpoints, you need to write a custom router that can trigger different route handlers for /v1/bitcoin/rates and /v1/bitcoin/rates/:currency. This takes a bit of playing around with regex:

Install the dotenv package to load environment variables from the selected .env file. This will generate the node_modules directory.

Use with dotenv – envguard doesn't load .env files, so pair it with dotenv

Dotenv - Loads environment variables from .env for nodejs projects

dotenv: Loads your environment variables

24. dotenv (63.3M weekly downloads)

This means you can either use .env files (e.g. with Next.js, Docker and Docker Compose, or by using something like dotenv in Node.js projects) or otherwise sets environment variables in the shell (either by explicitly calling export MY_VAR= or using something like direnv to do this automatically).

Here's how to set up environment variables in a Node.js project (you have to install dotenv):

Looking at the progress Node.js has made in the past few years makes me think that many popular and widely used npm packages might soon be unnecessary or even deprecated. Most Node.js developers are familiar with packages like dotenv for working with .env files, node-fetch for making HTTP requests, and jest for testing.

To avoid having the API key on client side, I coded this block on a Node backend app and used dotenv to inject my key to process object.