Environment variables

Environment variables serve the purpose of storing secrets like the database password, the app secret, or an API key outside of your application codebase.

In addition, environment variables can be used to obtain different configurations depending on the environment, such as the use of a secret to use an API or database identifiers.

Introduction

Normally, environment variables are accessible via Dart’s Platform class, but this is said to be immutable, so we can’t add data relating to our application to it.

So we’re providing an Environment class to access the various environment variables in your application.

The environment management is done from the Env class which is made available from the env_guard package.

abstract interface class Env {
  T get<T>(String key, {T? defaultValue});

  Map<String, dynamic> validate(
    Map<String, EnvSchema> schema,
    Map<String, dynamic> data,
  );

  void define(
    Map<String, EnvSchema> schema, {
    Directory? root,
    bool includeDartEnv = true,
  });

  void defineOf<T extends DefineEnvironment>(T Function() source, { 
    Directory? root, 
    bool includeDartEnv = true 
  });
}

We recommend that you use an .env environment file to store your environment variables as far as possible, although you can inject your variables using your CLI.

dart run src/main.dart --dart-define=MY_VARIABLE="Hello World"

DART_ENV=development
TOKEN=your_token
DISCORD_REST_API_VERSION=10
DISCORD_WS_VERSION=10
INTENT=3276799
LOG_LEVEL=TRACE