Question

Using App Platform database env variables

As I was looking into the environment variables documentation for App Platform, I could not understand what is meant by ${my-service.BINDABLE_NAME}. I’m using a nodejs server and trying to connect to the database on deploy. I tried process.env["database.HOSTNAME"] as a format but without success. I can’t for the life of me find these variables which are needed at deploy time (After starting the run command).

Thanks for your help

Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Steven Normore
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• October 17, 2020
Accepted Answer

@gabrielbottari 👋

The bindable variables are meant to be used directly in the values of environment variables that you define for your app components.

For example, you may just want to define your own environment variable called DATABASE_URL with value of ${db.DATABASE_URL}. The bindable reference of ${db.DATABASE_URL} will be replaced with the actual values when your app is deployed. The db prefix here is the name of my database component, so this would reference one of your own components.

You can input these bindable references directly in the UI where you enter environment variables, or if you’re working with a raw app spec YAML, you can include them directly in there. This is an example from our sample-golang-notes repo:

name: sample-golang-notes
services:
- name: web
  github:
    repo: digitalocean/sample-golang-notes
    branch: main
  envs:
  - key: DATABASE_URL
    value: ${db.DATABASE_URL}
databases:
- name: db
  engine: PG
  version: "12"

If your application code is in nodejs, then you would then access your environment variables as usual, depending on what name you’ve given them, with process.env.DATABASE_URL.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up