Can't read my environment variable in my Node.js app

Question

I am on Ubuntu 12.04 and I\'m just learning about environment variables. I am trying to read a custom variable from within my application but it always shows up as undefin

Answer 1

Restart your bash (source ~/.bashrc). This will take into account your system environment.

Answer 2

I found my way here from something really silly.

I had just added the new exported variables, but my node process still wasn't seeing them. Then I realized it wasn't enough to restart the node process—I had to open a new terminal (ie. bash instance) too. Once I did this, it worked fine :)

Answer 3

You need to export shell variables in order to make them available to processes you execute in your shell.

Compare the output of this command:

FOO=bar; bash -c 'echo $FOO'

with the output of this:

export FOO=bar; bash -c 'echo $FOO'

Answer 4

You might want to consider using a library for managing app configuration.

For example nconf helps manage configuration through

• command line argumets
• environment variables
• files
• etc..

And looking at the source is a nice way to learn https://github.com/flatiron/nconf