Backend Environment Variables

This page describes how to set environment variables for your backend classes.

These variables can be either secrets such as database keys or 3rd party API keys, or variables to use globally across your backend classes.

Set environment variables using the genezio dashboard

To set environment variables in the backend classes, head to the Dashboard page of the project.

Click on the Environment Variables button on the sidebar:

Add the environment variables like a <key, value> pair. After adding all the environment variables hit the Save button:

Note: You can also import environment variables from a file using Import from .env button.

Set environment variables using genezio CLI

You can load your environment variables when deploying genezio in the CLI by appending the following flag:

genezio deploy --env <your-env-file-path>

info

Depending on your project's structure - a fullstack single repository or dedicated repositories for backend and frontend - be careful to provide the correct path to the file:

--env .env or --env ./server/.env.

Use environment variables locally

When testing locally with genezio local, the environment variable are loaded by default without any prior flags.

For fullstack single repositories, the default path and name of the environment variables file will be:

<root-directory>/<workspace.backend>/.env

For dedicated server repositories, the default path and name of the environment variables file will be:

<root-directory>/.env

If the file used to store environment variables has a different name or is located to a different path, you must provide the new name/location using the .env flag:

genezio local --env ./custom-path/.my-env

Note: There is no need for you to explicitly use the dotenv library in your code.

How to use the environment variables in your project

The environment variables used on the deployed environment are exported.

TypeScript

To access an environment variable use process.env.MY_VARIABLE

main.ts

const myVariable = process.env.MY_VARIABLE;
console.log("Print environment variable", myVariable);

JavaScript

To access an environment variable use process.env.MY_VARIABLE

main.js

const myVariable = process.env.MY_VARIABLE;
console.log("Print environment variable", myVariable);

Dart

To access an environment variable use Platform.environment['MY_VARIABLE']

main.dart

import 'dart:io';

void main() {
my_variable = Platform.environment['MY_VARIABLE'];
print(my_variable);
}

info

Note: There is no need to import specific libraries for loading environment variables (such as dotenv).genezio will implicitly load the .env file while testing locally.