Add option to ignore process.env when on CI

[goatandsheep]

Originally opened by @lmcjt37

My team found during an upgrade to react native, along with many other packages, that a change occurred that caused our .env.test to be ignored in favour of the environment variables injected via the CI. This appeared to only be the case when running yarn test --coverage.

Interestingly, when changing the coverageProvider to "v8", the environment variables were correct. But that didn't solve all our issues and raised other significantly complex issues.

[github-actions]

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[goatandsheep]

What are you using .env.test for? Are you able to remove the environment variables from the CI settings? I don't think I'm understanding but I thought the whole thing about choosing the environment name through ENV= (or APP_ENV= if that doesn't work) is that you can choose which set of environment variables to go with, i.e. one for testing, one for CI, etc. Let me know what I'm not understanding.

Also are you running multiple tests in the same script? I wonder if this is a caching problem.

[lmcjt37]

The weird thing is that before the upgrade everything was working, the upgrade introduced a lot of breaking changes.

Our .env.test file is there specifically to inject variables for unit tests, and we load the file in specifically through babel.config. We found this issue only when running yarn test --coverage, so perhaps something in the environment changes specifically for Jest (since the update) when the coverage flag is set.

In our case we saw the CI environment variables taking precedence over the loaded .env file in the above scenario which caused our tests to fail.

Additionally, I had tested setting APP_ENV which didn't make a difference, and could see logging showing me the expected steps in your script were running through.

[goatandsheep]

What happens if you delete the CI environment variables? Are you able to do that without messing up the builds?

[lmcjt37]

We aren't able to remove the variables being overridden. These values are secrets hence the .env.test to replace just the necessary ones.

But, what you're asking about removing the value from the CI. That will allow the .env.<ENVIRONMENT> to work as expected. This is why I introduced the additional argument as it seemed a less invasive approach. If it's not used then everything carries on working as is.

[goatandsheep]

I think there's already a way to make sure that we don't import the local variables. Let me check

[goatandsheep]

Can you set the necessary variables to undefined in your babel.config.js? This will clear the values in process.env

[goatandsheep]

@lmcjt37 I am hesitant to add this not only because it encourages a bad practice but because your context implies you're likely using this library in a dangerous way. You should have .env.test in your .gitignore unless it is very generic settings. You should be setting your environment variables through the CI portal. If you know of a case where this happened because of unnecessary system environment variables taking priority, then we should collaborate on toggling system environment variables, but not for this context. This library is meant to emulate dotenv-flow for babel-specific projects and this is outside of that scope.

[lmcjt37]

I'm happy to close this.

We have since refactored our pipeline and context variables. So it's likely this isn't an issue any longer.

I will retest without our patch to confirm.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.