Vercel with Astro

Learn how to make Vercel, Astro, and Dotenv Vault work together. This tutorial assumes you have already created a .env file and synced it.

You can find a complete example repo here.

1. Install dotenv

Install dotenv.

$ npm install dotenv --save

2. Preload dotenv

Preload Astro scripts using dotenv. This will inject the environment variables ahead of Astro.

"scripts": {
  "dev": "node -r dotenv/config ./node_modules/.bin/astro dev",
  "start": "node -r dotenv/config ./node_modules/.bin/astro dev",
  "build": "node -r dotenv/config ./node_modules/.bin/astro build",
  "preview": "node -r dotenv/config ./node_modules/.bin/astro preview",
  "astro": "astro"
},

example

3. Run dotenv-vault build

Run npx dotenv-vault build to build your encrypted .env.vault file.

$ npx dotenv-vault build

4. Get DOTENV_KEY

Run npx dotenv-vault keys production.

$ npx dotenv-vault keys production
remote:   Listing .env.vault decryption keys... done

dotenv://:[email protected]/vault/.env.vault?environment=production

5. Set DOTENV_KEY

Visit your Vercel Project > Settings > Environment Variables.

Set DOTENV_KEY to the value returned in step 4.

6. Commit and push

That’s it!

Commit those changes safely to code and push to GitHub.

When the build runs, it will recognize the DOTENV_KEY, decrypt the .env.vault file, and load the production environment variables to ENV. If a DOTENV_KEY is not set (like during development on your local machine) it will fall back to regular dotenv.

It worked if you see the message ‘Loading env from encrypted .env.vault’.