--- title: Environment Variables .env with Java slug: environment-variables-env-with-java published_at: 2021-01-12 08:00:09 +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/cdimascio/java-dotenv ## 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 java-dotenv ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### 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, java, java-dotenv, @cjav_dev] views: 7381 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/environment-variables-env-with-java youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HsGbTZObQ youtube_id: o1HsGbTZObQ embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/o1HsGbTZObQ thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o1HsGbTZObQ/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Environment Variables .env with Java *Published: January 12, 2021* *Views: 7381* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HsGbTZObQ) [![Environment Variables .env with Java](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o1HsGbTZObQ/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HsGbTZObQ) ## 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/cdimascio/java-dotenv ## 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 java-dotenv ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### 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 accountant 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 1 to 3 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 often times in your bash RC 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 . --an 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 and file with those that are globally available on our machines so we can create a dot end file here and set maybe we have our stripe secret key straight palpable key and then maybe like a demo variable abc123 okay and we're gonna 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 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 demonstrate how to build stripe stripe integrations for different products and 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 and that example is a template for your dot n 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 empty 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 dot end file I'm sorry into the Ruby directory in the server in the server directory and add a dot 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 dot end file that has our striped publishable key and we have a stripe secret key and a webhook secret might be for handling web hooks and you might have you might also have a stripe plane NID I happen to have one called movies and so that's how you modify the dot end file so if we change directories into the server directory and start the Ruby server with Ruby Det server dot RB that will start up a new server at localhost for two for two that we can navigate to and now our our API keys are going to be used when working with this demo all right let's learn how to use environment variables in our Java applications I already have a pom da XML file here and what the the first thing I want to do is go install the dependency that's going to allow us to load a dot end file and merge those environment variables with those that are globally available so we're gonna go to our dependencies which you'll see our empty right now so we're just going to install this sedum ASCII ho Java dot n package and which this is going to be the package that allows us to load the environment variables from a dot end file rather than just those globally available ok so we'll say maven package and that should install that ok let's also create a directory structure and then we'll open up and implement our app okay so this is going to look something like this we're going to import or it's going to be packaged com'd striped sample and then we're going to import I owed github dot I'm cheating a little bit I have this written down so dot n dot dot n okay so this is the the package that we're going to use to load the environment variable and we'll just create a main method here and yeah so we need to initialize and load n so the way this works is we create a new instance of end with the load command and now we're gonna just print out some environment variables so we'll say secret this is the secret key and the way that we access environment variables is just saying dot n dot get and then the name of the environment variable okay so in our local end file we have this stripe secret right here so we can access this stripe secret value because we've loaded it from this dot end file let's see that we can also access these globally available environment variables so we set an environment variable called X earlier in the show and now we're going to try to access that with this dot end and see that we can access both those that are globally available and those that are in the dot end file here that we're loading ok so now we can package this up again and run this okay all right and we see that the secret that printed out was this sk test and we have X that was also printed out you'll notice that in the dot n file we don't have X defined but it is defined globally and also we do not globally have strive secret available that was defined only in the dot n file so by using this Java and package we're able to load environment variables and merge those that are available globally with those that are available from the dot and file again the most common use case for this with a stripe integration is loading up those stripe secret keys and initializing the stripe Java library so that's how we use environment variables with Java alright hopefully you found this useful we'll see you next time you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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