dotenv VS fastify

We will put our Emailjs environment variables in a dotenv (.env) file. To read more about the purpose of this file click here.

Add .env to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being committed. Here's an example file with it already added. You may also use dotenv for advanced configuration and it will automatically load environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

dotenv: Designed to load environment variables from a .env file into the process.env environment

Like Doppler, Infisical uses environment variable injection. Similar to the Dotenv package for Node, when used in Node, it injects them at run time into the process object of the running app so they're not readable by any other processes or users. They can still be revealed by a crash dump or logging, so that is a caveat to consider in your code and build scripts.

We'll be working with databases' ids and different info that should be secured so I would advise you to create a .env file to store said info. We'll do this by installing dotenv into our project and use it accordingly:

dotenv - For reading our API keys from the environment

As an avid dotenv user I wanted to thank their maintainers for keeping the project alive for 10 years (wow). A perfect exemplary of dedication to Open Source.

Sensitive data like database URLs, API keys, and passwords should never be hardcoded in your application code. Instead, use environment variables accessed at runtime to keep this information secret. Popular dotenv libraries like dotenv make this easy for Node.js apps.

For example, Fastify removed the instanceof operatorfrom its codebase because it was causing problems for those developers that rely on jest as a testing framework.

Both are frameworks but NextJs is for Forntend (web app in browser that use ReactJs under the hood) and NestJs is for Backend (server app running on a server witch use Express or Fastify). The only thing similar between them is the typed language in which they were written.

Restify & Fastify Hapi

Let's create a sample Node API project we can work with throughout to build a new docker image. We will leverage Fastify to create an API that we configure via the fastify-cli.

Fastify

In setting out to build this service, we wanted to use gRPC for its APIs. We’ve been reaching for REST when building APIs so far, primarily out of necessity, i.e., our public APIs needed auto-generated client SDKs and docs for developers working with them. We built those APIs with Fastify and Typebox but felt burned by a code-first approach to generating an OpenAPI spec. I’ll spare you the details and save that experience/learning for another article. Suffice it to say we love gRPC’s schema-first approach. This blog post summarizes our feelings well

Fastify – Fast and Low overhead web framework

Custom Functions are powered by Fastify (a light-weight Node.js framework that claims to be faster than Express.js), so they’re extremely flexible.