Basic Node and Express - Use the .env File

Backend Development
1

UPDATE: finally managed to solve, will update later. No need for anyone to waste their time trying to help, unless you feel like doing a little debugging practice!

Half the time when I post here, the solution simply comes to me about 30 seconds after posting, so here’s hoping. Anyway, I’ve been stuck with this one for a while and I just can’t figure out what is wrong (seeing as ‘{“message”: “Hello json”}’ does display, I’m guessing that process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE is not being accesed for some reason, but everything looks OK, the file is correctly named and in the root folder. Any help will be much appreciated.

Exercise summary:

Create a .env file in the root of your project directory, and store the variable MESSAGE_STYLE=uppercase in it.

Then, in the /json GET route handler you created in the last challenge access process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE and transform the response object’s message to uppercase if the variable equals uppercase. The response object should either be {"message": "Hello json"} or {"message": "HELLO JSON"}, depending on the MESSAGE_STYLE value. Note that you must read the value of process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE inside the route handler, not outside of it, due to the way our tests run.

Failed test message:
" The response of the endpoint /json should change according to the environment variable MESSAGE_STYLE"

Relevant snippet.

app.get("/json", function(req, res){
       if(process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE==="uppercase"){
        res.json({"message":"HELLO JSON"})
    }else{
        res.json({"message":"Hello json"})
    }
})

My screen:

image
image1366×768 68.1 KB

Project link:
solution: https://3000-freecodecam-boilerplate-2bhim2a2ctj.ws-us108.gitpod.io

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Challenge Information:

Basic Node and Express - Use the .env File

2

Hi! Can you tell me how you got your problem fix? I’m ocurring the same problem right now and still can’t figure out.

3

We need to see your code, please open your own thread.

You should have a .env file with the variable/value and access it as explained in the challenge. If you are running on Replit they have a Secrets option you must use instead.

4

In my case, the problem was that I had added the variable to the process.env file. I didn’t know you can create a file with an extension and no filename, so since the lesson tells you to use process.env.VAR_NAME , I created a file called process.env

In reality, I just needed to create a fille named .env that has no name and add the variable name there.

5

Thanks for your reply. For some magical reason when I open the challenge again today it just work.
I did create a .env file and put the VARIABLE/value there, I even went as far as going to the user setting and add an environment variable but it didn’t work. Good thing it all settles now.

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