How to set process.env from the file in NodeJS?

Question

I\'m new to the Node.JS. I found few articles says we can use .env file to setup the process.env variable, e.g.,

PORT = 8081

but when I run

Answer 1

Dotenv file have become the most popular mode to separate configuratione from app, using system environment variables (see 12factor config).

On node there exists a lot of libraries for loading config from .env file. The most popular is motdotla/dotenv. You can read a lot of examples on readme file about the usage of this library

Answer 2

Make a config.js file with the following content:

module.exports = {
    bar: 'someValue',
    foo: 'otherValue'
    ...
}

Then you can do this in some file:

const config = require('./config');
let foo = config.foo;