Environment Variables

With Keel you can have as many environments as you need and often different environments need different configuration. This is where environment variables are useful.

Defining Environment Variables

Environment variables are defined in a keelconfig.yaml file which should be in the root of your project.

environment:
  - name: MY_ENV_VAR
    value: "my staging value"
  - name: MY_ENV_VAR
    value: "my production value"

Use keelconfig.staging.yaml and keelconfig.production.yaml to configure your hosted environments. You can read more about this here.

Names

Environment variables must be named in UPPER_SNAKE_SNAKE and cannot start with any of the following values:

• KEEL_
• AWS_
• OTEL_

Values

Environment variables are always strings. You don't have to provide a value for every environment type.

Using Environment Variables

There are two ways to use environment variables in Keel. You can do this from your Keel schema or from your function code.

From a Keel schema

Environments variables can be accessed with ctx.env.ENV_VAR_NAME from within any expression in your schema.

model Person {
    fields {
        name Text
    }
 
    actions {
        create createPerson() with () {
            @set(person.name = ctx.env.PERSON_NAME)
        }
    }
}

From a function

You can access your environments variables in a type-safe way through the ctx argument that is passed to your functions, for example ctx.env.MY_ENV_VAR.

export default MyFunction(async (ctx, inputs) => {
  // "some-vale"
  ctx.env.MY_ENV_VAR
 
  // TypeScript will catch this with the error:
  // ts(2339) Property 'FOO' does not exist on type 'Environment'.
  ctx.env.FOO
});