Production Environment Variables

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>> Scott Moss: The Next thing is make sure we configured our port to be dynamic. I know we already did this, but just in case someone didn't do it, here's your chance to do it Make sure you do that, so Go to your index file and make sure this is dynamic. OK, make sure this is based off of process.env. Port.

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Port. Which if I click on this. It is, it defaults to 3000, but it definitely reads it from the environment variable first. So if you hardcode it down and you never changed it, you're not gonna be able to deploy this app I promise you.

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So if you hardcode it down and you never changed it, you're not gonna be able to deploy this app I promise you. You have to make that dynamic cause you don't know what port you're gonna get when you deploy it. You're assigned a port. So make sure that's dynamic, yeah, never hardcode the port number in Production always use processing.

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So make sure that's dynamic, yeah, never hardcode the port number in Production always use processing. Port. Prepare your environment variables. This just means, you know, wherever your environment variables may be, you know you're gonna need them in Production, start collecting them.

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This just means, you know, wherever your environment variables may be, you know you're gonna need them in Production, start collecting them. You can put them in a separate file right quick because a lot of providers now allow you just to like add a dot ENV file and they'll add them all for you at once, which is kind of cool, but just get all your environment variables that you need, you know, whoever you got Slack, whoever you, whatever you gotta do, go get your environment variables get ready. We have the database URL. Whatever other ones we need, get those ready.

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Whatever other ones we need, get those ready. Always, you know, create new secure values for Production, never reuse Development, Secrets. Never. There should never be anything that's a secret.

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There should never be anything that's a secret. That you use for Development and also Production that is just asking for it so don't do that also replace any hard coded instances where you might have put localhost anywhere right? So I don't think we have that anywhere in our app. Nope, just an ENV and then some docs.

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Nope, just an ENV and then some docs. So if like if you were doing like a redirect to like another route and you put Localhost 3000 slash, OK, that's not gonna work anymore. You hard coded that whatever URL you get in Production is not gonna be Localhost, I promise you, so you need to make that dynamic. That provider in this case render will give you an environment variable that will tell you what your URL is so you can access it in your app.

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That provider in this case render will give you an environment variable that will tell you what your URL is so you can access it in your app. You just gotta go read render docs to know what the name of that environment variable is. But they will give you one. Every, I guess it's that one, Render external url, every.

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Every, I guess it's that one, Render external url, every. Every hosting provider will inject several environment variables into your app to let you know the state of things, so. Keep that in mind. These are just common places where you might have hardcoded the URL like course configuration email templates is a big one, webhook URLs, documentation, sure, front end API calls absolutely.

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These are just common places where you might have hardcoded the URL like course configuration email templates is a big one, webhook URLs, documentation, sure, front end API calls absolutely. This was important because render defaults to a previous version of, Node JS in our package JSON, which is just one way to do this, but the easiest way to do it is we need to add this engines field to our package JSON with Node and its value set to anything greater than 24.3. So you just want to copy this engine's part right here. And you wanna go to your package JSON?

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And you wanna go to your package JSON? And anywhere on the route, you just wanna to paste that in there. If you don't do that, render's gonna default to like version I think it's like 22 or something like that which is below the minimum which I said you're gonna need. So if you don't do that, you this won't work cause TypeScript doesn't work on Node at that version.

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So if you don't do that, you this won't work cause TypeScript doesn't work on Node at that version. Make sure you have that. The last thing is prepare your main branch, and I realized. It doesn't have to be your main branch.

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It doesn't have to be your main branch. Like, obviously if you're going to Production and this is a real thing, yeah, you probably would have this on your main branch, but it doesn't have to be, and for the sake of this exercise, like you can put on any branch that you want, you can tell Render where you where you want to deploy from, but yeah, typically it's like main branch, but a lot of this comes down to like your process. Maybe your team has a Production branch, maybe your team has something else, but typically it is main. But you can put it wherever you want if you've been following along with me and having different branches you're like, oh, I don't wanna mess up main that's fine.

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But you can put it wherever you want if you've been following along with me and having different branches you're like, oh, I don't wanna mess up main that's fine. You can make any branch that you want to be the branch that you want to deploy and then you can tell render it's that branch. Me, I'm not gonna put it on main because I'm cutting branches all over the place. I'm probably gonna pick another branch to deploy what I'm about to deploy now, but just get whatever branch you're about to make ready with the code that you want to be deployed, get that ready.

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I'm probably gonna pick another branch to deploy what I'm about to deploy now, but just get whatever branch you're about to make ready with the code that you want to be deployed, get that ready. Read that Branch, get ready to push up the GitHub. Open up a Pull Request or push it directly, however it is, just get it on github.