Environment Variables and their Validation
In this lesson, we'll learn how we can securely store sensitive and environment-based variables using our .env file. We'll also learn how AdonisJS adds type-safety to these variables using our env.ts file as validation.
- Author
- Tom Gobich
- Published
- Feb 04
- Duration
- 4m 16s
Developer, dog lover, and burrito eater. Currently teaching AdonisJS, a fully featured NodeJS framework, and running Adocasts where I post new lessons weekly. Professionally, I work with JavaScript, .Net C#, and SQL Server.
Adocasts
Burlington, KY
Transcript
Environment Variables and their Validation
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[music]
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So although our cache service works as intended,
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it's storing information in memory for at least the duration of our server's lifetime,
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there is a better, more scalable option that we can utilize instead called Redis.
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And AdonisJS has first-party support for Redis.
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Now, Redis has a server of its own,
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so we're going to need to connect to it through our AdonisJS application.
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And in order to do that, we're going to need a way to set connection details
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based on the environment with which we're in.
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For that purpose, environment variables exist,
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and you can find them within your .env file within your application.
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If we click into this right now, it's going to be a very bare-bones list
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of key-value pairs that we have in this .env style syntax.
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You have the key on the left-hand side of the equals,
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and then you have the value on the right-hand side of the equals.
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Now, as you can see, so far within this file,
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we have basic information about the specific environment that we're running within.
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We have the host that our application is running on,
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the desired port that our application should run on,
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the time zone, log information, the environment itself.
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So these are all variables that could be different
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depending on the specific environment that our application is running on.
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It could be something on my computer and something entirely different on yours, for example.
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And for a fact, the node.env will definitely be switched to production
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whenever our application is out running on our production server.
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In addition to just being environment-specific, they also hold secrets.
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For example, our app key is a secret that we don't want people to know
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because it's used by the encryption module to sign our encrypted values.
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So if you ever have anything that is environment-specific
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or a secret that you don't want to be shared with anybody else,
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the environment variables is the place that you want to put it.
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Now, in addition to this key-value pair here,
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AdonisJS also provides type safety for this via the env.ts
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that we saw earlier within our start directory.
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This is going to define what we expect to be within the .env.
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And if AdonisJS finds anything within the .env file declaration
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that doesn't match our literal .env file, it will fail to boot our application.
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For example, let's go ahead and dive into our terminal, stop our server.
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Let's dive back into our code base, jump into our .env,
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and let's remove the app key. I'm just going to cut it out for right now.
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We'll paste it back in whenever we're done.
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If we dive into our env.ts now, it has a declaration for the app key
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that states that it should be a type of string.
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And our app key also doesn't have optional specified on it, so it is required.
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If it were optional, it would look something like this.
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So let's go ahead and remove that, and let's try to boot up our server.
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So I'm going to hide our text editor back away to get down to our terminal.
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And now that we have removed the app key from our .env file,
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let's go ahead and try to boot our server up with npm run dev.
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I'm going to hit Enter. We'll see it run, and look at that.
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Our HTTP server has died, though it's still watching for changes.
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So if we were to fix this error, it would boot right back up.
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The only reason that it died is because it's missing the environment variable
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app key, which is expected because we removed it from our .env file.
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So the validation failed for one or more environment variables,
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and it's using that env.ts file within our start directory to check that.
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So we have two options here to remedy the issue that we've created.
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We can either make that environment variable optional,
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or we can add it back into our .env file.
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So let's open our text editor back up. Now the app key is actually something
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that is required by AdonisJS itself.
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If we make this optional, it will fix the issue that we're specifically seeing,
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but it will create others. So let's go ahead and make this optional
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so that we can see that this is a valid option to fix this particular issue.
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So let's give this a save, hide our text editor back away, and there we go.
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We see a completely different error, though our server still died.
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The error is now missing app.app_key.
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The key is required to encrypt values. Let's dive back into our code base,
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remove the optional that we added in because this is something
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that is required for our application to run successfully.
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Hence, why we'll want to specify it as required within our env.ts.
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We can give our env.ts a save and add our app key back in.
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Give that a save, hide our text editor back away,
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and voila, our server is back up and running.
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We can verify that within our browser. We saw it do a refresh.
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We'll go ahead and do a sanity check there, and everything's still A-OK.
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We can hide that back away, and we still see our cache is getting hit within our terminal.
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So in the next lesson, we'll install Redis, configure it within our application,
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and swap our cache system out so that we are using something
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a lot more scalable as opposed to
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our singleton service within our application.
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Introduction
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Fundamentals
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2.0Routes and How To Create Them5m 23s
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2.1Rendering a View for a Route6m 29s
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2.2Linking Between Routes7m 51s
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2.3Loading A Movie Using Route Parameters9m 17s
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2.4Validating Route Parameters6m 6s
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2.5Vite and Our Assets6m 38s
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2.6Setting Up Tailwind CSS9m 5s
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2.7Reading and Supporting Markdown Content4m 32s
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2.8Listing Movies from their Markdown Files8m 51s
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2.9Extracting Reusable Code with Services7m 4s
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2.10Cleaning Up Routes with Controllers4m 52s
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2.11Defining A Structure for our Movie using Models9m 38s
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2.12Singleton Services and the Idea of Caching6m 11s
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2.13Environment Variables and their Validation4m 16s
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2.14Improved Caching with Redis10m 44s
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2.15Deleting Items and Flushing our Redis Cache6m 46s
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2.16Quick Start Apps with Custom Starter Kits6m 28s
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2.17Easy Imports with NodeJS Subpath Imports8m 40s
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Building Views with EdgeJS
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3.0EdgeJS Templating Basics8m 49s
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3.1HTML Attribute and Class Utilities6m 9s
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3.2Making A Reusable Movie Card Component10m 24s
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3.3Component Tags, State, and Props4m 53s
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3.4Use Slots To Make A Button Component6m 56s
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3.5Extracting A Layout Component5m 13s
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3.6State vs Share Data Flow2m 59s
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3.7Share vs Global Data Flow6m 7s
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3.8Form Basics and CSRF Protection6m 13s
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3.9HTTP Method Spoofing HTML Forms3m 3s
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3.10Easy SVG Icons with Edge Iconify7m 57s
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Database and Lucid ORM Basics
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4.0Configuring Lucid and our Database Connection4m 3s
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4.1Understanding our Database Schema9m 35s
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4.2Introducing and Defining Database Migrations18m 35s
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4.3The Flow of Migrations8m 28s
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4.4Introducing Lucid Models5m 43s
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4.5Defining Our Models6m 49s
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4.6The Basics of CRUD11m 56s
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4.7Defining Required Data with Seeders11m 11s
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4.8Stubbing Fake Data with Model Factories13m 48s
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4.9Querying Our Movies with the Query Builder15m 30s
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4.10Unmapped and Computed Model Properties3m 24s
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4.11Altering Tables with Migrations7m 6s
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4.12Adding A Profile Model, Migration, Factory, and Controller2m 57s
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4.13SQL Parameters and Injection Protection9m 19s
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4.14Reusable Query Statements with Model Query Scopes8m 11s
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4.15Tapping into Model Factory States9m 15s
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4.16Querying Recently Released and Coming Soon Movies4m 59s
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4.17Generating A Unique Movie Slug With Model Hooks7m 59s
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Lucid ORM Relationships
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5.0Defining One to One Relationships Within Lucid Models5m 49s
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5.1Model Factory Relationships2m 54s
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5.2Querying Relationships and Eager Vs Lazy Loading5m 17s
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5.3Cascading and Deleting Model Relationships5m 16s
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5.4Defining One to Many Relationships with Lucid Models6m 56s
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5.5Seeding Movies with One to Many Model Factory Relationships5m 24s
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5.6Listing A Director's Movies with Relationship Existence Queries8m 41s
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5.7Listing and Counting a Writer's Movies8m 41s
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5.8Using Eager and Lazy Loading to Load A Movie's Writer and Director5m 18s
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5.9Defining Many-To-Many Relationships and Pivot Columns9m 48s
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5.10Many-To-Many Model Factory Relationships4m 50s
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5.11A Deep Dive Into Relationship CRUD with Models18m 5s
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5.12How To Create Factory Relationships from a Pool of Data13m 55s
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5.13How To Query, Sort, and Filter by Pivot Table Data9m 47s
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Working With Forms
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6.0Accepting Form Data12m 15s
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6.1Validating Form Data with VineJS9m 29s
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6.2Displaying Validation Errors and Validating from our Request7m 16s
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6.3Reusing Old Form Values After A Validation Error2m 3s
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6.4Creating An EdgeJS Form Input Component5m 28s
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6.5Creating A Login Form and Validator5m 1s
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6.6How To Create A Custom VineJS Validation Rule9m 7s
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Authentication & Middleware
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The Flow of Middleware7m 49s
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Authenticating A Newly Registered User4m 14s
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Checking For and Populating an Authenticated User2m 10s
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Logging Out An Authenticated User2m 24s
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Logging In An Existing User6m 54s
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Remembering A User's Authenticated Session6m 55s
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Protecting Routes with Auth, Guest, and Admin Middleware5m 36s
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Filtering and Paginating Queries
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