GAE - Having environment variables play nice with node.js apps

Question

It seems like the environment variables in app.yaml are rendered in Python-like strings, where booleans like true become True and empty variables becomes None . Anyone have ideas on how to make it play nice with javascript without doing explicit conversion for all my variables?

const MY_ENV_VAR = (process.env.MY_ENV_VAR === 'None') ? null : process.env.MY_ENV_VAR;

Yes, I can write some function to do it. Wondering if anyone has a clever solution.

Answer 1

The only additional available configurations related to Javascript are for Node.js and they are quite simple. As per the official documentation of the app.yaml file , the option Javascript related is to set the runtime and that's it, unfortunately. There is not direct way to configure better usage for the environment variables.

Considering that and that, I agree with you, having better handling of environemt variables in Javascript would be better for a lot of cases. Due to that, I would recommend you to raise a Feature Request in Google's Public Issue Tracker , so they can take a look at it and verify the possibility of implementing it in the future.

Let me know if the information helped you!