Node.js, Open source and Secret Keys

So you want to use of 3-rd party web services that require API keys, but also make your app available to opensource? Can be done. For example, if you’r using Heroku, you can put your secret keys as Environmental variables:

$ heroku config:set KEY_MAPBOX=xxx.yyy
$ heroku config
=== my-app Config Vars
KEY_MAPBOX:    xxx.yyy

BTW, if you want to connect your folder to the app do this:

heroku git:remote -a project

Now, you can use it in Node.js app with key = process.env.KEY_MAPBOX. But what about time when you develop your app? Setting it via bash’s export is not fun, so to help with this, ther’s a small npm module node-env-file.

npm install node-env-file --save

It uses .env file to pull the variables if they are not set:

var fs = require('fs'),
    env = require('node-env-file')
    
if (fs.existsSync(__dirname + '/.env' )) {
  env(__dirname + '/.env')
}

console.log("Secret: " + process.env.KEY_MAPBOX);

And the .env file looks like this:

KEY_MAPBOX=xxx.yyy

That’s better. Now how about synchronizing the .env with Heroku? Use ddollar/heroku-config to pull / push from .env:

$ heroku plugins:install git://github.com/ddollar/heroku-config.git
$ heroku config:pull