Greg Tyler

Weeknotes: 21st October 2019

Published on 26th October 2019

This week I sorted out our environment variables.

Just a short one this week, since I’m again doing it late. My notable piece of work was completely rewriting how we handled environment variables. We now use far less variables, they’re clearer and they’re only set where they’re needed.

This started off as a small task, where I just wanted to remove a few variables I knew we weren’t using. But with a little pushing it turned into a pretty major rewrite, addressing several of the issues we’ve identified over the past few months.

Amongst the changes are:

This effective restart on environment variables will make our configuration and our debugging much clearer.

I hope it will also allow developers to be bolder when making future changes, because we won’t be prompted to worry about services that aren’t being used. For example, we were previously setting “OAUTH” environment variables which could make developers incorrectly assume the service used OAuth (perhaps sadly, it does not).

Summary