Nodemon.io VS dotenv

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.

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.

Using Chokidar to watch for the file changes - https://github.com/remy/nodemon/blob/main/lib/monitor/watch.js

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

Add the following code to your index.js file. Make sure to update the API_TOKEN with your secret. Even better: Use the dotenv NPM package to keep your code free of secret keys.

Let’s break down what’s happening here. First, we import the necessary packages, the Weaviate client and the dotenv configuration. dotenv is a package that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env. The Weaviate and OpenAI keys and URLs are typically stored in environment variables to keep them secret and out of your codebase.