vue environmental variables return empty object - vue.js

Question

I am new to vue and webpack, When I console.log(process.env. VUE_APP_API_URL) in my vue application, an empty object returns. I have a .env.development file with:
VUE_APP_API_URL=http://localhost:8000/api
The application backend is built in laravel which works fine. But I want to be able to store the api url as an environment variable.
My webpack.config.js
var path = require('path')
var webpack = require('webpack')
module.exports = {
entry: './src/main.js',
output: {
path: path.resolve(__dirname, './dist'),
publicPath: '/dist/',
filename: 'build.js'
},
module: {
rules: [
{
test: /\.css$/,
use: [
'vue-style-loader',
'css-loader'
],
},
{
test: /\.scss$/,
use: [
'vue-style-loader',
'css-loader',
'sass-loader'
],
},
{
test: /\.sass$/,
use: [
'vue-style-loader',
'css-loader',
'sass-loader?indentedSyntax'
],
},
{
test: /\.vue$/,
loader: 'vue-loader',
options: {
loaders: {
// Since sass-loader (weirdly) has SCSS as its default parse mode, we map
// the "scss" and "sass" values for the lang attribute to the right configs here.
// other preprocessors should work out of the box, no loader config like this necessary.
'scss': [
'vue-style-loader',
'css-loader',
'sass-loader'
],
'sass': [
'vue-style-loader',
'css-loader',
'sass-loader?indentedSyntax'
]
}
// other vue-loader options go here
}
},
{
test: /\.js$/,
loader: 'babel-loader',
exclude: /node_modules/
},
{
test: /\.(png|jpg|gif|svg)$/,
loader: 'file-loader',
options: {
name: '[name].[ext]?[hash]'
}
}
]
},
resolve: {
alias: {
'vue$': 'vue/dist/vue.esm.js'
},
extensions: ['*', '.js', '.vue', '.json']
},
devServer: {
historyApiFallback: true,
noInfo: true,
overlay: true
},
performance: {
hints: false
},
devtool: '#eval-source-map'
}
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
module.exports.devtool = '#source-map'
module.exports.plugins = (module.exports.plugins || []).concat([
new webpack.DefinePlugin({
'process.env': {
NODE_ENV: '"production"'
},
}),
new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin({
sourceMap: true,
compress: {
warnings: false
}
}),
new webpack.LoaderOptionsPlugin({
minimize: true
}),
])
}
I tried running npm install dotenv-webpack --save-dev and add it the webpack plugins but it still didnt resolve the issue.
How do I resolve this issue?

Answer 1

In order to load the configuration from your .env file you need to first install the dotenv dependency, and call require("dotenv").config() before calling your variable. This will load the variables and make them available using process.env.YOUR_VARIABLES