Problems Getting Started with environment variables

[teonbrooks]

Hiya! I am really excited about Indiekit. I've been wanting to get involved with the Indieweb space for a while but there are a lot of concepts to be aware of and I'm a newbie when it comes to web development.

I tried to set up Indiekit for myself this weekend but I ran into some problems getting up and running. I followed the instructions and got all the way up to the part where you go to /auth/new-password but everything came to a halt. I have my SECRET in my .env at the top-level of the project, but it doesn't seem to be seen with server.
Is there a different place this should go or am I going about this the wrong way?

Thanks for any advice you may have!

[paulrobertlloyd]

Hi @teonbrooks. The .env file will (typically) only work locally; your server will likely have a different way to set these values. Here are some examples:

• Fly
• Heroku
• Railway

What server platform are you using?

[teonbrooks]

I was trying to set up indiekit locally first to test out things before I added it to a server platform. I've only dealt with static sites before so I'm now dipping me my toe into having a server backend.

[paulrobertlloyd]

Oh right. .env files are not supported natively with Node.js, although this feature will be in an upcoming release. Until then, you need to use the dotenv package to enable reading environment variables from a .env file.

Here’s some quick instructions

1. npm install dotenv --save-dev

2. Add the following to the top of indiekit.config.js:

   import * as dotenv from "dotenv";
   
   dotenv.config();

That should mean that the .env file is recognised and its values loaded.

It’s also possible to load variables in the command line:

SECRET=mysecret npm start

Let me know if this works!

[teonbrooks]

thanks for the response. I have that currently in the indiekit.config.js but I still receive the error. However, when I tried the command line suggestion, I was able to get to the page where it allowed me to generate a password secret. I then added it to my .env but it still raise the same error when I tried to reload it.

[paulrobertlloyd]

Do you have your Indiekit config hosted on a repo or can you share it here? I will try and see if I can replicate the issue you are seeing.

[chrisfinazzo]

I'm taking another run at this and following the steps shown above returns a 501. I'm guessing this value needs to be set at my host as well (e.g, Netlify)?

👋🏼 @teonbrooks,

Did you have to set a build command for your generator (Jekyll, Hugo, etc.) in the .env at your host first in order to reach that page?