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Building a realtime multiplayer browser game in less than a day - Part 3/4

Srushtika Neelakantam on June 12, 2020

Hello, it's me again 👋🏽 Welcome to Part 3 of this article series where we are looking at the step by step implementation of a realtime multiplaye...
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lakaschus profile image
lakaschus •

I'm a little confused about where to save the API key. I guess I shouldn't place it directly in the code, because then it would be exposed. So you mention a secret .env file. Do I just have to paste the key in the process.env file? How does the code read the API key from this file?
Thank you for this tutorial!

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Srushtika Neelakantam •

Hey - yes. So the front end client doesn't use a key directly, it uses a token (which is why you see an authUrl). As for the backend server, it uses the API directly via the env variables. Your .env file at the root of the project would look as follows:

ABLY_API_KEY=yourapikeyvalue
PORT=5000
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This can be accessed from the code as follows:

const envConfig = require("dotenv").config();
const ABLY_API_KEY = process.env.ABLY_API_KEY;
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alaskaThunderfx •

Thank you! I wasn't sure about this as well, and this also answered my question!

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Angel Superstore •

Your post is so helpful. Thanks for sharing all those information. masonry contractors san antonio tx