Though I mostly use my Linux desktop for my development work. But there are many times when I have to switch to my MacBook. Especially when I am traveling or feeling bored working too much on my desktop.
For that reason, I have stopped using local databases for all my work. I mainly use Neon DB, even as a local database. So I won't have issues when switching between devices. But still, there is another issue. Using the environmental variables. For all the running projects, environmental variables keep getting added. So it is a pain to sync all the environments.
I was looking for a solution to this problem. Then I found Doppler. It is such a nice tool. Now, with a few commands, I can sync my environment among my devices. I then also remembered that I used Doppler before. The first time I used Doppler was in StretchDollar. But I actually forgot about this for a long time.
Doppler has a great free plan, which should be enough for personal work. It's also very easy to integrate it with different cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
To use Doppler:
-> Install Doppler CLI into your system.
-> Use doppler login To log in to the Doppler CLI.
-> To set up the project, go to your project root and use doppler setup
-> To push existing .env into Doppler use doppler secrets upload .env
-> To verify secrets use doppler secrets or doppler secrets --only-names to see the names only.
-> To run the server, use a command like doppler run -- npm run dev, doppler run -- npm start, doppler run -- go run main.go or doppler run -- uvicorn main:app --reload based on which framework you are using.