example-with-custom-env

This repository contains an Actionhero example showcasing how to modify the environment at runtime and integrate with the config system. Specifically, we focus on needing to rely on an async method to determine what these changes to process.env should be. Perhaps you need to load the config from an API or read them from the file system.

config/hero.ts and initializers/hero.ts

These are the 2 "normal" actionhero components that our config is trying to set up. We have a new entry for config.hero.favorite which we then want to log in an initializer.

// config/hero.ts
const namespace = "hero";

declare module "actionhero" {
  export interface ActionheroConfigInterface {
    [namespace]: ReturnType<typeof DEFAULT[typeof namespace]>;
  }
}

export const DEFAULT = {
  [namespace]: () => {
    return {
      favorite: process.env.FAVORITE_HERO,
    };
  },
};

// initializers/hero.ts
import { Initializer, config, log } from "actionhero";

export class MyInitializer extends Initializer {
  constructor() {
    super();
    this.name = "hero";
  }

  async initialize() {
    log(`Loaded favorite hero: ${config.hero.favorite}`, "warning");
  }
}

modules/asyncConfig and .env

This is our example method that will modify process.env within an async function.

// modules/asyncConfig
import * as path from "path";

// I modify process.env from an .env file, and I'm async
export default async function getConfig() {
  await sleep(); // to really demonstrate an async function
  const envFile = path.join(__dirname, "..", "..", ".env");
  require("dotenv").config({ path: envFile });
}

function sleep(time = 1000) {
  return new Promise((resolve) => {
    setTimeout(resolve, time);
  });
}

We are using the dotenv package to load the contents of .env into our environment.

# normally, you shouldn't check this file into git, but this is an example.

FAVORITE_HERO=BATMAN

server.ts

Finally, we load and run getConfig() as part of the setup of our server.

#!/usr/bin/env node

import asyncConfig from "./modules/asyncConfig";

async function main() {
  // modifying the environment needs to happen before requiring or importing Actionhero
  await asyncConfig();

  const { Process } = await import("actionhero"); // <-- note the use of async import

  // create a new actionhero process
  const app = new Process();

  // handle unix signals and uncaught exceptions & rejections
  app.registerProcessSignals((exitCode) => {
    process.exit(exitCode);
  });

  // start the app!
  // you can pass custom configuration to the process as needed
  await app.start();
}

main();

visit www.actionherojs.com for more information

To install:

(assuming you have node, TypeScript, and NPM installed)

npm install

To Run:

npm start

To Test:

npm test