session VS dotenv

https://github.com/expressjs/session/issues/360 this is an issue I think that's very close to mine, no concrete solutions though..

Passport needs to be initialized as middleware as well. And it requires a session middleware for storing state and user data. The most common session middleware is express-session.

You need to pick a session store for your cookies. By default, I think express-session uses an in-memory store which means sessions are reset every time the server restarts. Redis is what I'd generally recommend for managing session stores, but setting up Redis is ANOTHER configuration update. There are a bunch of other options, too, such as using a Mongo database as a session store.

If you want to store your session data manually on Redis, check here. But in this article I will use Express session middleware which can work with Redis for user session management.

This problem can be solved by using a "session store" library such as connect-redis (see express-session's documentation for the list of session store libraries for Express.js). The idea is to keep session tokens in a dedicated database, and each time the user makes an HTTP request with their session token, the server receiving the request will consult this database to learn whether the request comes from the authenticated user or not. Performance suffers consequently, as retrieving data from a database always takes some time.

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.