Environment Variables

[xavicolomer]

Hi there,

I'm thinking on developing a plugin which allows me to switch environments easily

The challenges:

1. I am developing multiple APIs which have different stages (dev, staging / testing, and production)

2. This stages might be deployed in different accounts, dev is for example my own Amazon account, but testing and production might rely on the client.

3. Serverless / AWS Cli stores the configuration on the ~/.aws/credentials and as far as I know it must be changed manually everytime you target a different account

4. Finally those environments might also need other custom parameters such as Database configurations

The possible solution:

Note: I already created a little NodeJS script which allows me to switch AWS config based on parameter.

a. Develop a plugin wich allows me to switch accounts based on configuration files.

b. Files would allow to give those configurations to certain users, for example a junior developer would only have dev and testing and only senior developers would have the prod environment files

c. All environments files would be placed on a specific folder, for example .slsenv

.slsenv/
    dev.yml
    staging.yml
    prod.yml

d. The command could be:
sls deploy --environment dev --alias aliasName

e. Environment file could also store DB variables

environment:
    awsAPIKey: 123456789
    awsAPISecret: ABCDEF
    mySQLEndpoint: mysql.endpoint.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com
    mySQLUser: user
    mySQLAdmin: admin

f. Finally some environments could require some extra confirmation
Are you sure you want to deploy on prod?

What do you think people?

Am I reinventing the wheel? Is this something I could already do in the main yml?

Thanks!

[dougmoscrop]

What we do more or less is:

custom:
  stage: ${opt.stage, self:provider.stage}
  config: ${file(./env/${opt:config, self:custom.stage}.yml)}

This mens that you can sls deploy --stage=x and you get ./env/x.yml, but you can sls deploy --config=x --stage=y (use the same config on a different stage)

We use profiles to manage account access, and the profile is done via some interpolation/lookup in the config.

[xavicolomer]

@dougmoscrop by account access do you mean AWS Key and Secret?

Otherwise how do you change that?

[medikoo]

This is a plugin registry repository, where exchange should rather be limited to the state of this registry, and not to discuss ideas for plugins.

I propose to discuss plugin ideas at https://github.com/serverless/serverless/discussions