--- title: Environment Variables .env with Go slug: environment-variables-env-with-go published_at: 2021-01-04 08:00:07 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:07 +0000 summary: description: In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of managing environment variables with .env. ## Resources - https://github.com/joho/godotenv ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ## Table of contents 1:18 Setting environment variables with export 2:25 Create .env file 2:55 Using .env with Stripe Samples 4:59 Using .env with Go ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, @cjav_dev] views: 1849 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/environment-variables-env-with-go youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF6VUyxQ84 youtube_id: TWF6VUyxQ84 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWF6VUyxQ84 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TWF6VUyxQ84/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Environment Variables .env with Go *Published: January 04, 2021* *Views: 1849* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF6VUyxQ84) [![Environment Variables .env with Go](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TWF6VUyxQ84/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF6VUyxQ84) ## Description In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of managing environment variables with .env. ## Resources - https://github.com/joho/godotenv ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ## Table of contents 1:18 Setting environment variables with export 2:25 Create .env file 2:55 Using .env with Stripe Samples 4:59 Using .env with Go ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript [Music] an environment variable is a mechanism that you can use to set a custom value and then use that value later to change the way a running process behaves so their data usually changes pretty infrequently and the application is going to treat them like constants rather than mutable variables you can think of these as things that you would consider hard coding but would rather keep the value out of your code because either it changes between environments or because hard coding the value would leak some sensitive information like your api keys so there's a couple common use cases for environment variables that you may have heard of you've got execution modes domain names api keys that path variable that you're used to seeing so for api keys this is really the core use case when using environment variables for a stripe integration because exposing your secret keys can lead to a bad day so rather than hard coding your stripe api keys right in your code it's better to keep them in some sort of environment variable and even better if that file is secure encrypted and really only accessible to those who should have access to your full stripe account all right let's take a look at how we can interact with environment variables directly in our terminal so we can do things like set an environment variable by saying export x equals one two three and then echoing that back dollar x that's how we access the environment variable directly in our shell now we might also have a file called something like dot in environment variables that looks something like this where we have settings where we can say setting equals value and if we source that file in bash then those environment variables will be available to us so oftentimes in your bashrc or your bash profile you'll be modifying environment variables that you want to be loaded every time a new bash session starts so how does this pertain to stripe so we use a pattern within stripe samples and with developer office hours where we create a dot n file and then we use a suite of tools and libraries that allow us to import and merge those environment variables that are stored in the dot end file with those that are globally available on our machines so we can create a end file here and set maybe we have our stripe secret key stripe publishable key and then maybe like a demo variable abc123 okay and we're going to go through in in the language of your choice and we will load these environment variables with the dot end packages and see how to use them within our programs all right let's take a look at how we use environment variables within the stripe samples so we head over to github and check out all of these different stripe samples which are pre-built integrations on how to that should demonstrate how to build stripe stripe integrations for different products in different scenarios so if we look at this setup subscriptions stripe sample you'll notice that in the root of the project there's a dot n dot example file this dot n dot example is a template for your dot end file which will hold your your api keys and some other settings that are applicable to the sample so let's clone down this sample and take a look at where the environment variables are set so that you can go in and set up your own when working with stripe samples so you'll notice that in the root we still have this.m.example and we expect that that's going to be dropped into one of the server directories so i'm going to go into dot ruby and add a n file or i'm sorry into the ruby directory in the server in the server directory and add a end file so we want to look at the example and we want to make sure that our server matches the the keys match this the same names so i'm going to copy those over so now we have a end file that has our stripe publishable key and we have a stripe secret key and a web hook secret might be for um handling web hooks and then you might have you might also have a stripe plan id i happen to have one called movies and so that's how you modify the end file so if we change directories into the server directory and start the ruby server with ruby.server. that will start up a new uh server at localhost 4242 that we can navigate to and now our uh our api keys are going to be used when working with this demo all right let's learn how to use environment variables within a go application so we're going to use a package today called go.n and we're going to we can install it this way we say go get jojo dot go.n and we'll create a demo.go file which we can say package main and we're going to import let's see we need format and we need os and we need this this guy here so we will import all of these and then we'll say main and the way that this works is we're going to load um dot n using go to end the the method called load and then we need to check and see if there's any errors when we tried to load that and then you'll notice that when we use os.getn the environment variables that we have access to are those that are globally available but also those that were loaded from the dot end file that's in the in the local directory so if we pull up the dot n file here we'll see that we have this stripe secret publishable and demo as options for environment variables that we want to access so first let's load um dot n so we can say you know try to load this thing go.n dot load and then we're gonna we're gonna use um dot end is the the local file that we wanna load and if there was an error if error does not equal nil then we want to do this thing just say like error loading dot end otherwise we want to print secret and then we'll print out os dot get end and the stripe secret key okay similarly i want to demo that you can you can also access these globally available environment variables so we set one called x at the beginning of the episode and we're going to now access that and print that out so when we're using go.n it's going to load your your dot end file variables that are set and merge those with those that are globally available okay so we say go run demo.go now we see the secret is here and x is one two three so if we echo x we can see that that's one of our globally available environment variables but if we try to echo stripe secret that's not globally available because it's only defined in that dot end file this is one of the ways you can work with environment variables with go and the most common use case is that we have a dot end file where we're going to store our stripe api keys and then use those to initialize the stripe go library we're going to interact with that client library to make requests all right hopefully you found this useful we'll see you next time [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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