parcel-plugin-electron-dotenv

A plugin for the Parcel code bundler that inlines environment variables when building for Electron. It mimics exactly the behavior used by Parcel to inline environment variables for browser targets.

Installation

Add this plugin as a devDependency.

npm install parcel-plugin-electron-dotenv --save-dev

That's it!

If it doesn't seem to be working, try clearing your Parcel cache. There's a known issue in which cached .env values are not updated.

Why use this plugin?

This plugin will inline environment variables into your bundled Electron code using the same .env.<test|development|staging> files you're likely already using for your browser bundle.

Parcel automatically inlines environment variables declared in .env files when bundling browser code. However, it doesn't do this when bundling code that will be run in Node or Electron, because both already have direct access to their environment.

Unfortunately, Electron tooling doesn't provide an easy way (as far as I know!) to inject environment variables into an application's runtime. You can get around this by using the same library Parcel uses under the hood, dotenv, and populating process.env with the contents of your .env file at runtime. You can also get around this by including in your Parcel config something like this babel plugin (which also uses dotenv) to inline your .env values at buildtime.

These solutions will work, but only for a single .env file. Despite dotenv's official recommendation to only use one .env file, Parcel will look for any postfix to .env that matches NODE_ENV. E.g. .env.test will be read if NODE_ENV=test.

If you want a multitude of .env files to seamlessly inline values into both your browser and Electron bundles without any additional config, this is the plugin for you.