Application Environment

For this part of the lesson, explore on your own a little. Make a new Go project in a separate folder for a little proof of concept. Example:

Make a new folder secretFolder cd secretFolder Make a file called main.go in folder

Terminal (in folder) go mod init secretFolder

Follow the instructions in https://github.com/joho/godotenv to make a project that does the following:

• .env file with variables
• load file into main.go

Why?

Here are a few reasons why it is a good idea to have an environment for your configuration.

• Configuration separated from code: Makes it easy to have a different environment in development and production and to make changes to that environment.
• Security: When uploading your code to a version control system (e.g. GitHub), you can ensure that any passwords and secrets are in a separate file and not uploaded to the internet.

Beego Application Environment

In a Beego Application, we can load our environment in main.go.

package main

import (
	"queenbee/models"
	_ "queenbee/routers"

	beego "github.com/beego/beego/v2/server/web"
	"github.com/joho/godotenv"
)

func main() {
	err := godotenv.Load()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal("Error loading .env file")
	}
	models.InitDB()
	beego.Run()
}

Then, you can use any environment variable as needed in your program.

// whatever file
myvar := os.Getenv("MY_VAR")