Managing Configuration

The shipengine-connect env command allows you to set environment variables that will be available to your app once it is published to ShipEngine Connect. This allows you to manage application secrets and configuration data separately from your code and make changes to this data without changing your application code.

You should run this command before publishing your app. The values that are set at the time you run the publish command will be injected into your app once it is hosted in ShipEngine Connect. If you change those variables, you will need to re-publish your app before those changes will take effect in ShipEngine Connect.

When you run the shipengine-connect env command, you will include one of its subcommands listed below to indicate which environment variable action you would like to perform.

Commands

Set Environment Variables

This subcommand sets one or more environment variables.

shipengine-connect env:set NAME=value NAME_2=value2 ... NAME_N=valueN [OPTIONS]

Example:

shipengine-connect env:set API_URL=https://www.sandbox.example.com/api API_KEY=3435dfafa32424

Output:

API_URL=https://www.sandbox.example.com/api has been set
API_KEY=3435dfafa32424 has been set

List Environment Variables

This subcommand lists the values of all environment variables.

shipengine-connect env:list [OPTIONS]

Example:

shipengine-connect env:list

Get Environment Variables

This subcommand lists the current value for one or more environment variables.

shipengine-connect env:get NAME NAME_2 ... NAME_N [OPTIONS]

Example:

shipengine-connect env:get API_URL

Unset Environment Variables

This subcommand unsets one or more environment variables.

shipengine-connect env:unset NAME NAME_2 ... NAME_N [OPTIONS]

Example:

shipengine-connect env:unset API_URL

Options

--debug

This option enables verbose logging, which can be useful for debugging issues managing variables.

--format

This option formats the output of the shipengine-connect list command. Set this option to table to list the environment variables in a table format or dotenv to list the environment variables in the dotenv format.

Recommendations

Single File

We typically recommend having a single file in your project where you access your enviornment variables. This could be a constants.ts file, and we recommend having preset values that default to staging variables.

Example

export const API_URL = process.env.API_URL ?? 'https://www.sandbox.example.com/api';

import { API_URL } from './constants'

Moving to Production

We recommend when reaching out to the ShipEngine Connect Team to have your application moved into our production systems, that you also notify them of any environment variables that will need to be set, and what their values should be in both testing and production environments.