EnvNotes.md

The recommended practice is to use Railway's variable management

The recommended practice is to use Railway's variable management feature to handle environment variables for your production environment, rather than setting them directly in your Dockerfile. This approach provides several advantages:

Why Use Railway's Variable Management Feature?

1. Separation of Concerns: Keeps your environment-specific configuration outside of your Docker image, making the image portable across different environments.

2. Security: Sensitive information such as database URLs, API keys, and other credentials are managed securely by Railway and aren't hardcoded into your Dockerfile or source code.

3. Flexibility: You can change environment variables without rebuilding or redeploying your Docker image. This makes it easy to manage configurations for different environments (development, staging, production) from the Railway dashboard.

4. Automatic Injection: Railway automatically injects these variables into your container at runtime, ensuring that your application has access to the correct configuration.

How to Implement This

1. Define Variables in Railway: In the Railway dashboard, go to your project and set the environment variables (DATABASE_URL, PORT, CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS, etc.) under the "Variables" section.

2. Access Variables in Your Application: Your application should use Go's os.Getenv() function to access these environment variables, as they will be injected by Railway at runtime.

Example

Instead of defining this in your Dockerfile:

# Bad practice - don't do this in your Dockerfile
ENV PORT=3000
ENV DATABASE_URL=postgres://username:password@localhost:5432/dbname

You should let Railway inject them, and your Go code would simply access them:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	port := os.Getenv("PORT")
	dbURL := os.Getenv("DATABASE_URL")

	fmt.Printf("Server running on port: %s\n", port)
	fmt.Printf("Database URL: %s\n", dbURL)
}

Final Recommendation

• Use Railway’s variable management for all environment variables in production.
• Avoid hardcoding variables in Dockerfiles to maintain security, flexibility, and portability.
• Ensure your .env.example file is up-to-date to serve as a reference for required environment variables.

This approach is cleaner, more secure, and aligns with best practices for modern application deployment.