Flag some environment variables as required by Node build container

[AugustMiller]

Projects may want to interact with privileged resources outside of the build container (like a third-party search API), but not bake credentials into the repository itself.

• Cloud Build Process and Artifacts
• The Digital Ocean App Platform allows you to do this, but only via app spec

[timkelty]

It's worth noting that the node process builds what are presumably client-side assets, so anything actually "secret" wouldn't be appropriate to include.

[michtio]

I agree with you here, but in some build steps we need an API key to be read, e.g. in cases like SEARCH_ONLY_API from Typesense/Algolia and the works, for the CI/CD to actually pass, a connection needs to be established during the build process, otherwise it shouldn't be allowed to be deployed (responsibility of the npm run build script) but without actually having the possibility to run on FE variables it is tricky.

I support @brianjhanson suggestion beneath, this would actually be very nice, but it might become tricky if you want to keep your prefixed variables in the .env as most likely we'd need to hardcode it in the code either way. In many environments the front-end build artifacts could benefit of reading the .env file too.

[brianjhanson]

We could also an approach like Vite (and probably others) and automatically/only expose variables with a prefix to the node build.

[michtio]

@brianjhanson this is actually a great suggestion, this works like a charm with Vite. All in for this solution (This issue is actually one August wrote on my behalf ;))