Using lookupEnv and dotenv for configuration

[paluh]

What do you think about using lookupEnv and adding purescript-dotenv dependency to this project so we can have a bit more elegant (no direct FFI) way of handling configuration? Is it worth it? Should I provide a PR?

[robertdp]

That would work for server-side applications, but not with this projects bundling approach. Node process.env values are encoded at bundle time by Parcel, and can't be read from the environment or from a dotfile by the application because these don't exist in the browser.

[paluh]

Oh sorry. Stupid me ;-)

[paluh]

P.S.
@robertdp I was somewhat mislead by the code from Config.js. Is process a thing in the browser environment? I should probably just check where it is used ;-)

[robertdp]

process is a magic global variable that is provided by Node and doesn't exist in the browser. So the packaging/bundling tools have access to it at build/bundle time. After that we're out of luck.

In Parcels case it searches the JS it is bundling for process.env.SOME_VAR and replaces that with the string-encoded value from the environment. It also automatically loads dotenv config files and gives those values higher priority than values from the Node environment.

Config.js is just a convenient way of injecting these values so we can access them in the browser.