Config variables not visible as environment variables in Heroku app

Question

I've set a few custom config variables. I can see them in my application's settings->config variables. I can also see the values with the heroku config command. But when I start my application the environment variables are not there. I use (System/getenv "MY_VARIABLE_NAME") in Clojure to fetch them.

Is it because I try to retrieve them at boot time? Are they only available later? Or is there some twitch which I can get rid of by doing some trick? I've used config variables in Heroku before and they've worked, I don't know what's the problem here...

Answer 1

I was trying to retrieve client ID and secret for oauth authentication with Google from a config variable with System/getenv. I use a library called Friend to do this. Problem is, the set up for oauth parameters in that library is done via macros. And macro expansion happens compile-time. Heroku config variables are not available as environment variables during compilation (for good reasons). They are, however available via filesystem which was my solution to the problem. So instead of:

(System/getenv "MY_APP_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID")

I'm using this:

(slurp (str (System/getenv "ENV_DIR") "/" "MY_APP_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID"))

And it works!