--- title: Environment Variables .env with .Net slug: environment-variables-env-with-net published_at: 2021-01-06 08:00:06 +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. Note that this is how we use .env for Stripe samples, but you can also use .NET's built in secrets management. ### Resources - https://github.com/tonerdo/dotnet-env ### 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 DotNetEnv ### 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, Stripe.net, DotNetEnv, @cjav_dev] views: 3321 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/environment-variables-env-with-net youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFf2HlOcD24 youtube_id: QFf2HlOcD24 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/QFf2HlOcD24 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QFf2HlOcD24/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Environment Variables .env with .Net *Published: January 06, 2021* *Views: 3321* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFf2HlOcD24) [![Environment Variables .env with .Net](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QFf2HlOcD24/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFf2HlOcD24) ## Description In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of managing environment variables with .env. Note that this is how we use .env for Stripe samples, but you can also use .NET's built in secrets management. ### Resources - https://github.com/tonerdo/dotnet-env ### 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 DotNetEnv ### 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 with dotnet so the first thing we're gonna do is just create a very simple dotnet console application so I'm using the.net CLI and I'm gonna say dotnet new console it's gonna create a local console application for me and we're gonna be using the.net n package today which is going to allow us to manage environment variables in a dot end file and load those up and merge them with those that are global those environment variables that are globally available so we're going to say dotnet add packaged dotnet end and we should be able to load up and install this new dotnet and package okay so if we fire up program dot CS here we want to say something like secret ok so how does this work we need to use we're gonna be using dot net and as the package and then we want to load up the environment variables we do that by saying dot net n dot and load and now our local dot n file that lives right here will be able to use these environment variables within our running application so we can use these and also those that are that are globally available so let's just print out one of the environment variables so now we can say environment and and Tod get environment variable and then we pass in the name of the variable so here we're gonna say stripe secret okay let's also print out one of those globally available variables so we set X earlier in the episode here so let's also print out X to see that when we're using this dotnet and package it's loading both those environment variables that are globally available and we can use those that's actually the default but also it's helping us by adding the additional environment variables which are found in that dot end file okay so let's go dotnet run program and we can see the output here should show us the I must have spelled something wrong okay get environment get environment variable okay that's definitely different than this one okay let's try running that again alright so here we go we have our secret in that printed out sk test and we also have X which is one two three let me just run this again up here so we have a little bit more room so if we echo dollar x we see that that is a globally available environment variable if we tried to echo stripe secret that's not globally available because it's only in that dot n file so by using this dotnet end you're able to load environment variables from that dot and file so this is how we're gonna use environment variables now the most common use cases that we're going to load our stripe secret keys from a dot end file and set those when we're initializing the striped net library to make API requests with with that client library all right 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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