Environment Variables

Setting your .env.

Running the npx dashpress command for the first time on a project will generate a .env.local file there, which will look like this

.env.local
CONFIG_ADAPTOR=json-file
CONFIG_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING=PLACE_HOLDER_CONFIG_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING
 
CACHE_ADAPTOR=memory
CACHE_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING=PLACE_HOLDER_CACHE_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING
 
CREDENTIALS_ENCRYPTION_KEY=<SOME_RANDOM_STRING>
AUTH_TOKEN_KEY=<SOME_RANDOM_STRING>

These settings are good for most production use-cases but let's give details so you can make better decisions based on your needs.

CONFIG_ADAPTOR

DashPress needs to store a lot of things like your aes-256-gcm encrypted database credentials, application users, custom roles, app configuration etc.

CONFIG_ADAPTOR tells DashPress how to store this information. The options for you here are

  • json-file - Good for production cases but best for development
  • database - Best for production cases
  • memory - Only good for unit testing purposes
  • redis - Good for production cases as well

For most production use-cases we will encourage setting CONFIG_ADAPTOR to database or redis.

We don't encourage switching adaptors so we don't plan to have an adaptor migration script. Choose this setting carefully.

CONFIG_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING

If you choose database or redis in the option above then you will need to provide the credentials to it with CONFIG_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING. It takes in the connection string of the resource.

All database tables will be created automatically and prefixed with dashpress__

Using json-file creates a folder .config-data in your project folder so it will have to be moved everywhere you want to restore the project

Editing your configuration data manually, especially for json-file configuration can result in configuration loss if the JSON is malformed, So edit it at your risk

Not setting this value when required will cause your application not to start as DashPress can't set/read its settings

CACHE_ADAPTOR

There are some expensive/too frequent operations we do regularly in the backend. So, to speed things up, we cache these operations so that we don't do it again after the first time.

The default value of memory is good for all use-cases except when you are running multiple instances of DashPress for the same project as data mutated in one instance needs to be available to other instances.

This leads us to the only other option redis

CACHE_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING

if you want to use redis in the option above the CACHE_ADAPTOR_CONNECTION_STRING takes in the connection string to your URL

CREDENTIALS_ENCRYPTION_KEY & AUTH_TOKEN_KEY

We need an encryption key to encrypt your database credentials so that if even it gets leaked, attackers can't do any harm with it.

We also need an authentication key to encode your auth tokens securely.

As you may have seen, DashPress generates both keys for you so should be good not editing it but you can always edit if you want

These keys have the requirements of having uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and 64 characters

Setup