Environment Variables in Flex Plugins

We recommend that you manage your Flex application by using multiple accounts to represent different environments. For example: development, staging, and production. Each plugin you build can be deployed to your different environments based on your testing strategy. The Plugins CLI makes this easy by managing profiles to store your Twilio account credentials.

Each environment often has different values for certain parameters: the location of an API server, whether a feature is enabled, or the SID of a necessary resource. Environment Variables are an easy way to integrate these into your plugin.

Setting up Environment Variable support

You will need to modify your webpack configuration to enable environment variables. This will allow you to use a standard .env file for managing your variables.

1. Install dotenv

The dotenv-webpack package is our recommendation for managing environment variables with the Plugins CLI. Combined with webpack, which is natively used within the Plugins CLI, this package will allow you to access environment variables from within your plugin code. To install dotenv-webpack, run the following command from within your plugin directory:

npm install dotenv-webpack --save

In addition to installing dotenv-webpack, this will also add the library as a dependency within your plugin's package.json. If you are attempting a global installation or already have this package installed, make sure to update the package.json for each plugin you are updating.

2. Create .env files

Each Twilio account (i.e., each profile in your CLI) will get mapped to a single .env file. Create a new file in the root directory for your plugin and provide a distinctive name: .env.dev,.env.stage, and .env.prod.

An example of a .env file is shown below:

TWILIO_WORKFLOW_SID=WWXXXXXXX

3. Update webpack

Webpack must be customized to map your active CLI profile to one of the .env files you created. In the root directory for your plugin, replace webpack.config.js with the following code:

const DotEnvWebpack = require('dotenv-webpack');
module.exports = (config, { isProd, isDev, isTest }) => {
    /**
     * Customize the webpack by modifying the config object.
     * Consult https://webpack.js.org/configuration for more information
     */
    // We dynamically change the path to the .env that contains the file corresponding to our profile
    let envPath;
    switch (process.env.TWILIO_PROFILE) {
        case 'Dev':
            envPath = '.env.dev';
            break;
        case 'Stage':
            envPath = '.env.stage';
            break;
        case 'Production':
            envPath = '.env.prod';
            break;
    }
    // If path was set, use the dotenv-webpack to inject the variables
    if (envPath) {
        config.plugins.push(new DotEnvWebpack({
            path: envPath
        }));
    }
    return config;
}

Customize the switch statement based on the names of your CLI profiles and the filenames for your .env files.

4. Deploy plugin

To deploy your plugin to specific accounts and environments, use the following commands:

twilio flex:plugins:deploy --profile=StageProfileName

twilio flex:plugins:deploy --profile=ProdProfileName

Reading environment variables

All variables that you define in your .env files will be accessible within your plugin via process.env. Use these variables directly within your code:

console.log(process.env.TWILIO_WORKFLOW_SID);