Split up gulp config

[brianjhanson]

I feel like we should make a .env-y thing for our gulp config so we can set things like proxys and credentials for things like AWS in there without putting them into the repo.

[cmalven]

We kind of have that in /gulp/config.js its just not really intended to be outside of version control, and most of the things in it you wouldn't want to change from setup to setup. I get what you're saying.

I just implemented https://www.npmjs.com/package/dotenv on a node project earlier today, was super easy, and worked great.

[brianjhanson]

Can we use our existing .env file with that?!

[cmalven]

@brianjhanson that was my first thought too, and then the more I thought about it the more it seemed like, "sure why not". It's just a text file, and it's up to libraries (called dotenv in the case of both PHP and Node) to pull the contents of that file in and do something with it.

[cmalven]

@brianjhanson in the specific case of the browserync proxy value, we usually already have that value in our .env file as APP_SITE_URL!!!!

[brianjhanson]

😮

[brianjhanson]

Looks like this is as simple as

let path = require ('path');
let fs = require('fs');

// Get our .env file
let envVars = fs.readFileSync(path.resolve(__dirname, "../.env"), "utf8");

// Create an empty object to store our variables
let env = {};

// Turn our .env file into an object.
envVars.replace(/(\w+)="(.+)"/g, function($0, $1, $2) { env[$1] = $2 });

That will turn our .env file into an object. Then we can set proxy = env.APP_SITE_URL.

Using this on Belgravia with no ill effects, but just documenting here so I don't forget about it

[mkornatz]

A more robust regex (because it's possible to not specify quotes):

envVars.replace(/(\w+)="?([^"\n]+)"?/g, function($0, $1, $2) { env[$1] = $2 });

[cmalven]

Could we put this behind a module or something? e.g. var env = require('./utils/get_env')

Otherwise would definitely get gross having all of this boilerplate code in even one of our gulp files, let alone multiple files.

[cmalven]

Alternatively, as mentioned before, this module is dead simple to use: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dotenv

[mkornatz]

I vote for using dotenv! Thanks @cmalven.