Haugen/env-file-in-react-create-app.md

## env-file-in-react-create-app.md

      
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              env-file-in-react-create-app.md
            
          
    For a simple way to use environment variables in your react-create-app project, follow these steps:

Create a new file named .env in the root of your project.
In your new .env file, add a new key=value pair. For security reasons, you must prepend your key with REACT_APP, for example REACT_APP_API_KEY=abcdefg123456789
Restart your server development server. In order for React to find and register your newly created environment variable you must restart your server. Do this every time you add or change a variable.
Your new variables will now be available throughout your React app via the global process.env object. In our case, we could get our API key using process.env.REACT_APP_API_KEY.

Additinal notes


Since we commonly store secrets in .env you probably want to add it to .gitignore.
You don't need to install the dotenv package or anything else for this to work.