Question

I’m using Heroku and Stripe in a Python codebase.

There are different api keys stored in the .env file and not directly in a javascript file. Yet my stripe.js requires these keys.

I can access the keys in python, but my goal is to output a javascript constants file that contains this environmental variable so different deploys can use the different versions of the API key.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can access environment variables using:

import os
os.environ['THE_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE_NAME']

Regarding your particular use case, you could:

• Dedicate an URL to distributing the key and having clients hit that URL to retrieve it (do it once).
• Declare the variable somewhere else that is available to the browser (like, your base HTML template).
• Generate the full JS file on-the-fly at an URL (using a template to actually write JS and inject the key into it)