Nodejs: How to access the (process.env) variables of another project?

Backend Development
1

I have two projects, dataAdapter and main_project placed as follows:

folder:
|___main_project
|   |
|   |___.env
|
|___Packages
    |
    |___dataAdapter

The dataAdapter package is linked to the main_project using:

npm link "../folder/Packages/dataAdapter"

The main_project’s project is configured with the dotenv npm package installed and a dev.env file. I can access the variables from anywhere in the main_project project, but not in my local dataAdapter package.

The .env file in the main_project has the following variables:

DB_CLUSTER_URI=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I thought that I can just use process.env.DB_CLUSTER_URI in the dataAdapter package, but I got undefined instead.

Am I doing something wrong? Isn’t the dataAdapter package running under the same process as the main_project since it’s linked to it? How can I access the DB_CLUSTER_URI in the dataAdapter package from any project that links this package?

Thank you all for your time.

2

You can make it shared if it is in the root folder or you can use the path option dotenv has.

Edit: maybe I misunderstood your folder structure. Is it in the root?

3

Thank you for your reply.

The package dataAdapter is independent from the main_project, it can be linked and used by any other project, so I can’t specify a specific path to configure a .env file, instead, it should use the variable from the parent process that’s using it.

I hope this clarified my issue.