CODEWITHSUNDEEP
reactjscreate-react-app
Rick Baker
Rick Baker

Reputation: 903

create-react-app build/serve environment variables

Relatively new to working with react. I have an application that is working fine in local docker. I populate a bunch of REACT_APP_ environment variables by exporting them to the environment before starting the docker container.

Now, I'm trying to deploy this to a kubernetes pod by running a yarn build and then serving up the build. I see that the environment variables are available on the pod itself by looking at printenv but the application doesn't appear to be picking them up.

Is there something special with serving a production build of a react-app to get it to see the exported environment variables that I'm missing?

I don't want to embed an .env file into the built docker image for security reasons, so I'm hoping that running a react build via serve can still pick up exported REACT_APP_ environment variables that are set via kubernetes secrets.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1966

Answers (1)

Reginald Davis
Reginald Davis

Reputation: 19

So apparently, whenever you build a react application with npm, static files are produced that don't know anything about any environment variables you may try to inject at runtime with Kubernetes.

The article below does a good job of explaining this and why they choose to attach the environment variables to the JavaScript window object since it has application-scope available to it.

Making a React application container environment-aware at Kubernetes deployment

Upvotes: 1

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