Remove now.json in favor of built-in env vars support

[leerob]

Hey 😄 You might already know this, but I figured I'd mention it. You can remove now.json entirely with environment variables support first-class through dotenv in Next.js. You can also remove env from next.config.js!

Also - Inside Vercel, you can now more easily choose if your env var is a secret or plaintext.

[brianlovin]

I just have to go through and manually add all of these to my Vercel dashboard though, yeah? Or does having the secrets set already make this work out of the box? Right now I see this in the dashboard:

But of course I've already done vercel secrets add ... for each of the variables listed in the now.json file.

[leerob]

Convert - it's converting them from just secrets to env variables. When you select "secret", you'll be able to find all the existing secrets in the dropdown.

The biggest benefit is being able to run vercel env pull .env.local or a new machine and automatically set up your env, plus aligns with the best practices for env variables for those forking the repo 😄

If you hit any issues, please let me know!

[brianlovin]

@leerob I just closed this after making the changes, but now I'm wondering: is there a best practice for using GitHub actions to run CI with whatever the vercel dev equivalent would be? I need Cypress to run with access to my environment variables, in a secure way of course.

[leerob]

👋 I would suggest running Cypress again the preview deployment URL. That's what we do at Vercel 😄

[brianlovin]

Oh wow, that's quite smart actually – any chance you are able to share or publish some of those action workflow files? Otherwise I can probably figure out how to string that together so things run in the correct order.