Unable to access mailgun credentials with process.env in a node app

Question

I have a node app, and in the .env file, I've stored the credentials- api_key and domain. Now, I can't access the credentials anywhere in my application, let alone the part where I need them. I tried process.env.api_key and process.env.domain, and got the following error resulting in my app getting crashed even before compiling.

Error: apiKey value must be defined!

Here's my auth object:

const auth = {
  auth: {
    api_key: process.env.api_key,
    domain: process.env.domain  
  }
}

.env

api_key="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
domain="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.org"

When I try to use the credentials directly, everything works fine, but doing that is not a good idea, I suppose.

Answer 1

Having a .env alone won't do anything, since Node.js doesn't handle that file. You need to load it, you may want to use: dotenv package for that.

require('dotenv').config(); // very beginning of the file

// process.env.api_key will have a value now.
// rest of your code.

dotenv require must be before any other require.