I will talk about how I set up my variables for my application. This was useful when I don’t want to store important information in the code, especially if it is being pushed to a public repository. Here are a few important commands you can use in the terminal to set, view and unset environmental variables in shells.

Set sessional variables

> export EMAIL_PW=somesortofpassword
> export EMAIL_USER=ephemeral.messages@gmail.com

How to view environmental variables

> env

how to set temporary variables for a specific application

> env PORT=3000 node app.js

How to unset variables

> unset PORT