Environment variables in a monorepo project

Questions & Answers
#1

Hello,

I’m working with a monorepo project containing workspaces based in pnpm, because all the apps need the full workspace to be available to be able to build I have to use the folder containing the root of the workspace as the source.root for each application.

I’ve been trying to expose values in the PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS variable in the deploy hook by doing the following but this does not seem to work.

export REDIS_URL=redis://$(echo $PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS | base64 --decode | jq -r ".redis[0].host")

I kept reading the docs and found information about creating a .environment file in the source.root directory but because the apps have the same source root I’m not sure how to make sure that it only sets environment variables for the current app, I think that I could use an if to check the PLATFORM_APPLICATION_NAME variable to only set environments for the current app but it would be better if I could somehow include it in the applications.yml file or somehow have a separate .environment file for each application.

Thanks for any help!

#2

Hi there!

I believe if 1) every application’s source.root is set to the root directory and 2) you commit a .environment file at root, every application will have access to that REDIS_URL variable.

Your method of using a check for PLATFORM_APPLICATION_NAME in .environment should work though for this purpose. In the end, it’s probably the simplest way.

Placing it in .environment is the easiest way to ensure that the variable is available at deploy, post_deploy, command.start, and during SSH sessions. You could define it explicitly in applications.yaml for the app that actually needs access to it, but you would need to repeat the export statement at each of the stages I’ve listed above, and then it still wouldn’t be accessible by default when you SSH into that app container.

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