Access heroku config vars

[Erin Marchak]

Firstly, thanks for making a great, simple server! I'm really enjoying using Zero.

I'm hosting my React app on Heroku and hoping to store some API tokens in their config vars. The Zero documentation recommends that I use a .env file, which works fine locally but I wouldn't want to deploy it my server.

Is there a recommended way to access the config vars on the front end? It seems like I should be able to extend setupEnvVariables() if you'll accept a PR.

[Asad Memon]

You should be able to access all your env variables (set by heroku, or any other host) as you would in nodejs .js files:
process.env.GITHUB_USERNAME.

These aren't exposed to React .jsx files because that would expose them to your users. You can however pass them as props to your component like this:

// index.jsx
import React from "react";

export default class extends React.Component {
  static async getInitialProps() {
    return {
        "username" : process.env.GITHUB_USERNAME
    }
  }

  render() {
    return <p>My github username: {this.props.username}</p>;
  }
}

Does that solve the problem?

[Erin Marchak]

That helped a lot!

It ended up being that Heroku didn't provide any access to the env variables at all to the .jsx files. I ended up creating an express .js endpoint and handling it there. Which is more secure anyway.

Thanks!