Basic Node and Express - Use the .env File

Backend Development
1

Tell us what’s happening:

I am in step 6 of Basic Node and Express of Backend and APIs certification. I don’t know why the if statement wouldn’t execute:

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

when I attach the /json to my project url the json object of the else statement is displayed.
i have created a .env file with no name and its content is : MESSAGE_STYLE=uppercase

Your code so far

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

})

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Challenge Information:

Basic Node and Express - Use the .env File

2

Hi and welcome to the forum.

Are you working locally? (Pls clarify where you are working as that may affect your environment).

3

no i am not working locally, i am using the gitpod boilerplate

4 
app.get("/json", (req, res) => {
    if (process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE && process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE.toLowerCase() === "uppercase") {
        res.json({"message": "HELLO JSON"});
    } else {
        res.json({"message": "Hello json"});
    }
});
5

That doesn’t work either

Screenshot 2024-05-18 201355
Screenshot 2024-05-18 2013551826×463 109 KB

and yes i did reload(using npm start) the browser after changing the code

6

what result do you expect

7

what happens if you just log to the console the value of the process.env.MESSAGE_STYLE? is it what you expect?

8

have you read that part of the instructions about dotenv?

9

omg ilenia I literally ignored the instruction seeing its “If you are working locally…” thanks alot wow sh*t

10

I wanted the json object uppercased or lower according to the value of the the environment variable MESSAGE_STYLE which in this case was “uppercase”.