Many services, servers use environment variables for configuration purposes. Its a good way to keep private configuration settings outside of your repo.

However setting env variables can be a pain, as every time you restart your computer the variables needs to be set again.

One way to resolve this is to use .env files.

To install the .env package simply run:

npm i dotenv --save

And to use the package in your application add require('dotenv').config(); to your entry file as early as possible. Your entry file in a Node app is normally app.js at the root of your project.

Set variables in your .env as follow:

MY_ENV_VARIABLE=the-value-to-be-used

Now to have access to the variable in your application simply use:

process.env.MY_ENV_VARIABLE

That's it!