What's the proper way to handle environment variables?

[drewdecarme]

I wanted to see if there was a specific opinion on how to handle environment variables for both development and production builds of a nexus app.

There seems to be a lot of documentation surrounding environment variables for Prisma, specifically for opinions on the .env file being co-located with the Prisma schema. Or there is also more documentation on how to use a .env file that isn't co-located with your Prisma schema.

I know Prisma is only through Nexus using a plugin, but depending upon the opinions of the nexus team, the convention that Prisma established might conflict with what other's are using.

If you're anything like me, you typically use a mono-repo for a full-stack solution, and like to keep your .env files at the root of your repository and use dotenv to import them. I'm finding that this is problematic at nexus build time where the reflection process "runs" my code but doesn't have access to the environment variables that it might need.

Here's a specific example.

I'm using stripe and their recommended way of instantiating their JS SDK is via the following:

import { schema } from "nexus";
import { stringArg } from "nexus/components/schema";

const stripe = require("stripe")(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY);

// declarations below

Another example for using SendGrid:

import { send, setApiKey } from "@sendgrid/mail";

setApiKey(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY as string);

// declarations below

When nexus build is run, all of my environment files, including this one aren't initialized. It's only after the reflection process (I believe, kind of why I'm asking this question) that the environment variables are included in the solution via dotenv at my app.ts entry point.

In SendGrid's case, I'm getting the below error:

API key does not start with "SG.".
1440 ● nexus:plugin:nexusPluginPrisma Running generators

And I'm almost 100% sure that it's because that environment variable doesn't exist... at least at first it doesn't exist.

This long-winded question is more or less asking if first, this is a "correct" way in the eyes of the nexus team, and second if there is a "more" correct way of doing this?

Thanks!