How to define environment variable in create-react-app?

Taimoor Sattar
author

Environment Variable works differently in create-react-app. To access the environment variable in your app, you have to add the prefix REACT_APP_ before defining your variable as described in the below image.

create-react-app-env

In our app, you can access this variable as a process.env variable.

let BACKENDURL = process.env.REACT_APP_BACKENDURL || "http://localhost:8080";

You can define the environment variable in the .env file. If you are hosting your app in production like Netlify or Heroku, you can define varibles in their dashboard.

About the Author

image

Taimoor Sattar
I'm a full-stack developer and educator. I've always been intrigued by languages used elegantly and efficiently, regardless of whether they are interpreted by humans or computers.