AWS EC2 Express server and storage of ENV keys

I am trying to host my express server. I am cloning the repo into my ec2 instance also it will need env keys for database.

How to store the env keys. Will it be correct if I just create .env keys into my project inside of ec2 and launch my server.

The application will be exposed on the public ip on port 8000

Solution

It is best practice to keep only normal configuraiton properties in env file. but for confidential properties like user name and password, you should configure it using a shell script.

Sample Script

#!/bin/bash
export DB_USER="value"
export DB_PASSWORD="value"
npm run start

Solution 1:

You can call it startup script which contains above code, and start ec2 machine, and execute this manually.

Solution 2:

set this as user data on ec2 machine startup configuration
it will run every time you ec2 restart, this is recommended way.

Further you can explore, these are AWS service to get secured key=value pairs

AWS System Manager Parameter Store
AWS Secret Manager