How to keep env variables in a project?

General
1

Hi,

In my project, each device has several unique properties such as serial_number and owner_id. Every time I setup a new device for my customer, I need to manually set the env vars for the flow by double clicking the flow tab and put the key-value pairs in.

I have a development machine which will push changes and all the devices will only pull from the repo. However, every time I pull the code, the env vars will be overwritten, I have to manually set the vars for each single device.

It has a very bad scalability if there are thousands of devices, it is impossible to manually setup the env vars every time I need to update the code.

What would be the best practice of this?

Thank for helping!

2

That depends on the OS and how you run node red.

3

It runs on Ubuntu 20.04, there is a service for node-red named run_node_red to run node-red.

4

The Linux Node-red installer supplies a systemd script which can set up environment variables. But you seem to be using some other startup mechanism.

You can specify environment variables in settings.js. it's not difficult to write a script to do this.

5

In the systemd script you can include a file containing env vars, which you could modify for each system. As @jbudd says the pi/debian/ubuntu install script does this for you. The systemd script includes the line
EnvironmentFile=-/home/colinl/.node-red/environment
so you could do something similar in your script. The - before the path tells systemd not to error out if the file does not exist.

6

I will give a try, thanks for helping! @jbudd @Colin

7

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.