Environment Variables

An environment variable in Node.js is accessed in your code using process.env.MY_ENV_VAR.

We deploy your tasks and scale them up and down when they are triggered. So any environment variables you use in your tasks need to accessible to us so your code will run successfully.

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In the dashboard

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Setting environment variables

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Editing environment variables

You can edit an environment variable’s values. You cannot edit the key name, you must delete and create a new one.

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Deleting environment variables

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In your code

You can use our SDK to get and manipulate environment variables. You can also easily sync environment variables from another service into Trigger.dev.

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Directly manipulating environment variables

We have a complete set of SDK functions (and REST API) you can use to directly manipulate environment variables.

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Sync env vars from another service

You could use the SDK functions above but it’s much easier to use our resolveEnvVars function in your trigger.config file.

In this example we’re using env vars from Infisical.

import type { TriggerConfig, ResolveEnvironmentVariablesFunction } from "@trigger.dev/sdk/v3";

//This runs when you run the deploy command or the dev command
export const resolveEnvVars: ResolveEnvironmentVariablesFunction = async ({
  //the project ref (starting with "proj_")
  projectRef,
  //any existing env vars from a .env file or Trigger.dev
  env,
  //"dev", "staging", or "prod"
  environment,
}) => {
  //the existing environment variables from Trigger.dev (or your local .env file)
  if (env.INFISICAL_CLIENT_ID === undefined || env.INFISICAL_CLIENT_SECRET === undefined) {
    //returning undefined won't modify the existing env vars
    return;
  }

  const client = new InfisicalClient({
    clientId: env.INFISICAL_CLIENT_ID,
    clientSecret: env.INFISICAL_CLIENT_SECRET,
  });

  const secrets = await client.listSecrets({
    environment,
    projectId: env.INFISICAL_PROJECT_ID!,
  });

  return {
    variables: secrets.map((secret) => ({
      name: secret.secretKey,
      value: secret.secretValue,
    })),
    // this defaults to true
    // override: true,
  };
};

//the rest of your config file
export const config: TriggerConfig = {
  project: "proj_1234567890",
  //etc
};

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Local development

When you develop locally resolveEnvVars() will inject the env vars from Infisical into your local process.env.

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Deploy

When you run the CLI deploy command directly or using GitHub Actions it will sync the environment variables from Infisical to Trigger.dev. This means they’ll appear on the Environment Variables page so you can confirm that it’s worked.

This means that you need to redeploy your Trigger.dev tasks if you change the environment variables in Infisical.

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The variables return type

You can return variables as an object with string keys and values, or an array of names + values.

return {
  variables: {
    MY_ENV_VAR: "my value",
    MY_OTHER_ENV_VAR: "my other value",
  },
};

or

return {
  variables: [
    {
      name: "MY_ENV_VAR",
      value: "my value",
    },
    {
      name: "MY_OTHER_ENV_VAR",
      value: "my other value",
    },
  ],
};

This should mean that for most secret services you won’t need to convert the data into a different format.