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Environment Variables

In development, we use direnv to setup environment variables required by the application.

  • If you want to add a new environment variable to affect only your development machine, export it in .envrc.local. Variables exported in this file take precedence over those in .envrc.

  • If you want to add a new environment variable that is required by new development, it can be added to .envrc using one of the following:

    # Add a default value for all devs that can be overridden in their .envrc.local
    export NEW_ENV_VAR="default value"

    # or

    # Specify that an environment variable must be defined in .envrc.local
    require NEW_ENV_VAR "Look for info on this value in chamber and Google Drive"

Required variables should be placed in google docs and linked in .envrc. The value should also be placed in chamber with DISABLE_AWS_VAULT_WRAPPER=1 AWS_REGION=us-gov-west-1 aws-vault exec transcom-gov-dev -- chamber write app-devlocal <key> <value>. For long blocks of text like certificates you can write them with echo "$LONG_VALUE" | DISABLE_AWS_VAULT_WRAPPER=1 AWS_REGION=us-gov-west-1 aws-vault exec transcom-gov-dev -- chamber write app-devlocal <key> -.

For per-tier environment variables (that are not secret), simply add the variables to the relevant config/env/[experimental|staging|prod].env file with the format NAME=VALUE on each line. Then add the relevant section to config/app.container-definition.json. The deploy process uses Go's template package for rendering the container definition. For example,

MY_SPECIAL_TOKEN=abcxyz
{
  "name": "MY_SPECIAL_TOKEN",
  "value": "{{ .MY_SPECIAL_TOKEN }}"
}