I am building a react app and i need to fetch data from my api, now i want to store the api url as an environment variable. I have my .env file, i have dotenv installed, here is my code process.env.API_URL is returning undefined.
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import logo from './logo.svg';
import './App.css';
import Home from '../src/components/Home'
import dotenv from 'dotenv'
import path from 'path'
class App extends Component {
render() {
console.log(process.env.API_URL)
return (
<div>
<Home/>
</div>
);
}
}
export default App;
Three things to note here
the variable should be prefixed with REACT_APP_
eg: REACT_APP_WEBSITE_NAME=hello
You need to restart the server to reflect the changes.
Make sure you have the .env file in your root folder(same place where you have your package.json) and NOT in your src folder.
After that you can access the variable like this process.env.REACT_APP_SOME_VARIABLE
Additional tips
; or comma , at the end of each line.You will probably need to call dotenv.config() as suggested by the document
If you are using create-react-app, you don't need dotenv package. You will need to add REACT_APP_ prefix to the variable name in .env file. See the document here
Add prefix REACT_APP_ on React environment variables.
apiKey: process.env.REACT_APP_API_KEY
Make sure .env file is in the root directory.
src/
.env
.gitignore
package.json
package-lock.json
Restart the development server after making changes in .env file.
Copy only the value inside the quotation marks and don't forget to remove trailing commas(It haunted me for several hours). These examples will give you an error.
REACT_APP_API_KEY=Ach2o1invVocSn25FcQhash209,
REACT_APP_API_KEY="Ach2o1invVocSn25FcQhash209",
REACT_APP_API_KEY="Ach2o1invVocSn25FcQhash209"