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Environment Variables

Environment variables are one way to get information into the app at runtime. At a minimum, Ambient (more precisely the Session Manager) needs to have a session key so it can encrypt user sessions. Ambient is not opinioned about how you load the environment variables so you can load them from anywhere. We use the github.com/joho/godotenv package for reading from .env files.

You can also use the envdetect.LoadDotEnv() call to determine if AMB_DOTENV=true so you have control over when the .env file is loaded.

main.go
import (
    "log"

    "github.com/ambientkit/ambient/pkg/envdetect"
    "github.com/joho/godotenv"
)

func main() {
    // Load the .env file if AMB_DOTENV=true.
    if envdetect.LoadDotEnv() {
        err := godotenv.Load()
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatalf("app: error loading .env file: %v\n", err.Error())
        }
    }
    // ...
}

Built-In Environment Variables​

These environment variables are used through an Ambient app and can be used in plugins as well.

Suggested​

Session key to encrypt the cookie store. Generate with: make privatekey. This is not required, but suggested when using ambient-template because it's tied into the Makefile and the deployments to the cloud providers.

AMB_SESSION_KEY=

Password hash that is base64 encoded. Generate with: make passhash passwordhere. This is not required, but suggested when using ambient-template because it's tied into the Makefile and the deployments to the cloud providers.

AMB_PASSWORD_HASH=

Optional​

Set the default log level to: FATAL (4), ERROR (3), WARN (2), INFO (1), DEBUG (0). The default is: INFO. You can use text or integers.

AMB_LOGLEVEL=DEBUG
AMB_LOGLEVEL=0

Set the port the HTTP server will listen on. Default is: 8080

PORT=8080

Set the URL prefix if behind a proxy. Default is: unset

AMB_URL_PREFIX=/api

Set the time zone values from: https://golang.org/src/time/zoneinfo_abbrs_windows.go. Required if using MFA or another time reliant function. Default is: unset

 AMB_TIMEZONE=America/New_York

LoadDotEnv returns true if the AMB_DOTENV environment variable is set to true. Easy way to to control when .env is loaded. Sample code is above. Default is: false

AMB_DOTENV=true

When AMB_LOCAL is set to true (default is: false):

  • data storage will use the local filesystem instead of the cloud provider storage for storing the app configuration
AMB_LOCAL=true

Dev Console​

Enable the Dev Console so the amb CLI can interact with the app. You should not enable this in production. Default is: false

AMB_DEVCONSOLE_ENABLE=true

Set the URL for the Dev console that the amb CLI connects to. Default is: http://localhost

AMB_DEVCONSOLE_URL=http://localhost

Set the port for the Dev Console that amb CLI connects to. Default is: 8081

AMB_DEVCONSOLE_PORT=8081

Cloud Provider Environment Varibles​

There is also a package available in the plugin repository that will use the correct cloud storage based on where it's deployed called cloudstorage. The ambient-template repository uses it.