Best Practice for Environment Variables about importmap-rails

[jmckible]

@guybedford Thanks, it sounds like I'm not missing anything obvious. I'll continue to set meta tags for Rails.env and relevant Rails.application.config values until I come across something better.

And to document some use cases for others searching:

1. Stripe Publishable keys to differentiate production from test
2. Error reporting based on environment
3. Tagging releases for Sentry monitoring
4. Access to canonical host names based on environment

[guybedford]

@jmckible process.env is a CommonJS specific feature, and the process global isn't available in browsers.

Simply defining globals is one option - globalThis.RAILS_ENV = ... - they are exactly the shared global state.

There have been discussions around custom namespaces here like a import.meta.env dictionary or similar, but this is just hypothetical and there are currently no standards or common conventions for environment variables in both Node.js and the browser, short of the global.