Supporting Different Environments

Another aspect in which core.io tries to simplify the configuration process is by how it supports different development environments, like staging, development, production, etc.

In short: it does not.

To be more precise, core.io takes a very pragmatic stance and does not provide any way to (directly) manage different environments but has some recommendations that make having configuration files per environment unnecessary.

A lot of the things that need to change on each environment are secrets like service tokens or user keys. We chose to manage those by using process.env and environment variables.

If you use the provided Application.loadConfig then your configuration files are javascript files which, obviously, can have logic in it. Meaning that you can check the value of process.env.NODE_ENV and export different objects based on that value.

Another benefit of Application.loadConfig is that you can reference other parts of your configuration files and solve them at runtime, making your configuration files modular.

You can also make use of the afterSolver facility which gets access to the merged configuration object. In it you can access the environment key which holds the value of the current environment and modify your configuration file at runtime.

Case in point, you have options.

Ideally your configuration files should be logic lightweight in order to reduce possible errors and keep things simple, but you are free to do as you please.

You can also use an environment manager like [envset][envset] to dynamically populate your process.env variables. All you need is an .envset file where you define your environments, environment variables and their values:

[production]
NODE_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=FS40N0QY22p2bpciAh7wuAeHjJURgXIBQ2cGodpJD3FRjw2EyYGjyXpi73Ld8zWO
NODE_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=LSLhv74Q1vH8auQKUt5pFwnix0FUl0Ml
NODE_HONEYBADGER_KEY=LCgZgqsxKfhO
NODE_POSTGRES_ENDPOINT=50.23.54.25
NODE_POSTGRES_DATABASE=myproject
NODE_POSTGRES_PSWD=Pa$sW03d
NODE_POSTGRES_USER=myproject

[development]
NODE_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=HN5ITok3lDaA1ASHxtEpy1U9XCjZwThmfgoIYZk8bkOqc5yk6sT7AWd3ooNeRFV9
NODE_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=m35W4PGGVZfj1gOxYvztFxBD5F2605B3
NODE_HONEYBADGER_KEY=f3MNPUhZoki6
NODE_POSTGRES_ENDPOINT=localhost
NODE_POSTGRES_DATABASE=postgres
NODE_POSTGRES_PSWD=postgres
NODE_POSTGRES_USER=postgres

NOTE: If you use .envset remember to add it to your .gitignore file.

Lastly but more importantly, you can BYOS- bring your own solution- and use whatever configuration system you prefer.

TIP: To manage different environments you can always use [envset][envset]:

$ envset development -- npm start