I am trying to deploy a frontend react application with a django backend. I am able to get Heroku's PORT environment variable just fine for the Django backend, but no matter what I do or try, process.env.PORT keeps returning undefined. I have tried adding a temporary variable that begins with REACT_APP that just reads the PORT variable in the procfile. Env files won't work because the PORT variable is dynamically allocated.
Every resource I have found have said to either try a .env file or exporting the variable, but like I said, that is unrealistic because Heroku dynamically allocates the port. Any ideas?
Environment variables aren't available in the client. That's running in the user's browser, not the server. For that matter there isn't a Node process running on the server, either. Given you're using an NGINX buildpack the Django app is presumably in a different dyno entirely, you don't need to know which PORT it's bound to. - @jonrsharpe
In the Heroku deployed environment, the project should be oriented such that the frontend will make a request to the backend through a specific url configuration, not through a different port call.