New Lesson: Environment Variables

[01zulfi]

Lesson: Environment Variables

Lesson overview

What and why env vars && using dotenv. This new lesson will be placed before the new Express section. The security configuration lesson will be removed as a result.

Lesson outline

The following items define the scope of the lesson. The lesson outline is flexible; you can improve, expand, and omit items whilst writing lesson content (make sure the pull request description mentions that).

• What are environment variables and why they're useful && env vars live in Node's process.env
• Mention that we can manually populate process.env using the export cli command
• Mention there's a better way with the dotenv package
• Give a simple code example of installing & using dotenv

Acceptance criteria

If the requirements here are not met, the work effort is not complete.

• Lesson conforms to the outline above (unless outline has been modified).
• Lesson follows our Layout Style Guide.

Additional information

Get the lesson template

Download the lesson template using the following command (replace lesson_name with the actual lesson name):

curl -o <lesson_name>.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheOdinProject/curriculum/main/templates/lesson-template.md 

[MaoShizhong]

I'm happy to take this one. Whereabouts in the lesson order are you thinking this should be placed? Given that the Intro to Express was written with the assumption that environment variables have already been taught (though this can be amended accordingly).

[Baguirre03]

Oops. If youre too busy could I take this one Mao :) Would love your feedback on it though!

[MaoShizhong]

No worries at all, wasn't actually aware of the prior Discord discussion! All yours and looking forward to it! 🎉

[01zulfi]

@MaoShizhong I totally forgot about the env var mention in the Intro to Express lesson, good callout.

The env var lesson would be pretty much independent from any surrounding lessons, we could place it before the Express section altogether (updated the issue description accordingly).

[MaoShizhong]

Yeah, prior the the Express section probably makes most sense given it's a general Node thing 👍 One step further in the milestone! 🎉

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has had no activity for the last 30 days.