Node Environment Variable

In the oauth config tutorial, we have created a client for the react-client application. One has the redirect URI https://ob.lightapi.net for production, and another has the redirect URI https://localhost:3000 for local development. There are two client_ids available, and we have to put the client_id into the react-client application login function to access the /oauth/code endpoint.

Here is the login function in ResponsiveDrawer.js

    const login = () => {
        window.location = "https://obsignin.lightapi.net?client_id=f7d42348-c647-4efb-a52d-4c5787421e75&user_type=customer&state=1222";
    }

The client_id in the above function is for development, and the redirect URI is https://localhost:3000 in the database script.

When we build the react-client for production with yarn build, we need to find a way to replace the client_id to f7d42348-c647-4efb-a52d-4c5787421e74 with redirect URI https://ob.lightapi.net in the database record.

To make it possible, we need to leverage the NODE_ENV documented in https://create-react-app.dev/docs/adding-custom-environment-variables/

Let’s change the login function to the following.

    const login = () => {
        // this is the production redirect with redirect uri https://ob.lightapi.net
        let url = "https://obsignin.lightapi.net?client_id=f7d42348-c647-4efb-a52d-4c5787421e74&user_type=customer&state=1222";
        if(process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production') {
            // this is development redirect with redirect uri https://localhost:3000
            url = "https://obsignin.lightapi.net?client_id=f7d42348-c647-4efb-a52d-4c5787421e75&user_type=customer&state=1222";
        } 
        window.location = url;
    }

When you compile the app with npm run build or yarn build, the minification step will strip out the if block. And the resulting bundle will be smaller with only the production URL.

Before we can enable the yarn startHttps and use https://localhost to develop and test the react application locally with the login-view interaction, we need to have both ob and obsignin folder to host the two SPA applications. Every time the react-client code is changed, we need to run yarn build and copy the build folder to ~/networknt/light-config-test/light-router/local-openbanking/ob and restart the light-router instance to load the new site.

With the https://localhost:3000 supported, we can remove the ob folder from the local-openbanking folder as we will never run the production site locally anymore.

After removing the ob folder from local-openbanking under light-router, we need to update the docker-compose only to load the obsign.lightapi.net virtal host.

Here is the updated docker-commpose.yml

version: '2'

services:

  light-router:
    image:  networknt/light-router:latest
    ports:
    - 8443:8443
    extra_hosts:
    - "obsignin.lightapi.net:192.168.1.144"
    - "ob.lightapi.net:192.168.1.144"
    volumes:
    - ./config:/config
    - ./obsignin/build:/obsignin/build
    # - ./ob/build:/ob/build
    network_mode: host

As you can see, we have commented out the /ob/build volume mapping. We need to do the same for docker-compose-debug.yml as well.

In both config and debug folder, we need to update the virtual-host.yml to comment out the ob.lightapi.net virtual host. Here is the virtual-host.yml in the debug folder.

hosts:
  - domain: obsignin.lightapi.net
    path: /
    base: /home/steve/networknt/light-config-test/light-router/local-openbanking/obsignin/build
    #base: /obsignin/build
    transferMinSize: 10245760
    directoryListingEnabled: false
  # - domain: ob.lightapi.net
  #   path: /
  #   base: /home/steve/networknt/light-config-test/light-router/local-openbanking/ob/build
  #   #base: /ob/build
  #   transferMinSize: 10245760
  #   directoryListingEnabled: false

When all the changes are done, we can restart the light-router instance either in Docker or in IDE to start development again.

There is one thing that we need to be aware of. When you are using /etc/hosts to map a domain to a local IP address, you might comment it out later one to switch to the Internet DNS. The browser might have a cached site or cached DNS that needs to be cleared.

Chrome

Chrome caches the site and DNS for a long time, and you have to do something to clean it up. To refresh a website, you can click the refresh icon or open the developer tool and right-click the refresh icon and select Empty cache and hard reload to clear the cache.

To reset the DNS cache, you need to paste address chrome://net-internals/#dns and click Clear host cache.

Firefox

Firefox caches the site and DNS only for a short period of time, so you just need to wait a little bit for the cache to expire.

With all the changes above, we can use https://localhost:3000 for local development and use https://ob.lightapi.net for the test cloud. We only need to build the react-client once we need to deploy to the test cloud.

“Node Environment Variable” was last updated: February 25, 2020
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