Environment-based properties for Angular 2 App Served by Webpack?

Question

I\'m working with a standalone Angular console generated by JHipster and served by a Spring Boot server. I am looking to serve up the app with different properties based on

Answer 1

I did not end up installing the DotEnv plugin, but rather I implemented the DefinePlugin solution listed on the webpack page. Because I am a noob- I found the documentation confusing and the listed example did not work as it did not make use of the 'process.env' variable (which was a new concept to me).

Here's a rough step-by-step guide I used to setting up this system:

1. Create a webpack.envName.js file for each environment you want to support.
2. In addition to any build setup, create the DefinePlugin entry in each file that will utilize the custom property. In my initial tests, creating a "global" constant in my webpack.common would override the other environments so I avoided setting up the parameter there.
3. Create the DefinePlugin constant underneath the "process.env" key. This is a special key that js based systems use to store data for the particular process.
4. modify your yarn, node, mvn, etc build to utilize your local dev environment if that's not already happening. In my situation our dev environment is in the cloud, so I created a default local environment for localized testing.
   5. The defined constants are now accessible in their respective environments without any needed import type statements.

Here's an example snippet. My webpack.local.js file under the plugins entry:

...
new webpack.DefinePlugin({
'process.env': {
    NAME: JSON.stringify('local'),
    API_URL: JSON.stringify('http://localhost:8000/'),
}
})
...

Let's say I want to access these values in my fakeService typescript class:

~/src/main/webapp/fake-service.ts
@Injectable
export class FakeService {
    private URL_ROOT = process.env.API_URL + 'api/v2/externalService/resource/';
    constructor(private http: HTTP) {}
    get(): Observable<any> {
        if(process.env.NAME == 'local') {
            console.log("Calling url at " + this.URL_ROOT);
        }
       return this.http.get(this.URL_ROOT).map((res: Response) => res.json());
    }
}

There is probably a better way to do this (or will be in the future). Rather than building this process.env dependency into your application, it would probably be wise to create a Configuration Service that loads these values and can be injected into services or components that need to utilize this data.

Answer 2

I recommend the dotenv-webpack plugin.

webpack.config.js

const  Dotenv  =  require('dotenv-webpack');
...
plugins: [
   new  Dotenv({
      path:  './.env'
   })
]

.env

URL=http://example.com
ENV=PROD
...

This allows you to use process.env to access the environment variables:

constructor(private http:HttpClient) {
     http.get(`${process.env.URL}`).subscribe(t=> {
        ...
     });
}

The environment variables are subsituted at build time.