Introduction

When I started out working with xm cloud for the first time I was riding solo and didn't really need to concern myself too much with which variables would be different between developers. Simply because I was working on a POC. At some point in time however there must come a time for other developers to join the project. That's a proper time to consider which variables you'd want to be part of an .env.local file. There you might run into a problem, because working with multiple env files is not something that the starter kit supports out of the box.

The problem

within the powershell scripts provided there are multiple docker commands scattered, and none of those make it obvious how to work with environment files. Why? That's because every docker command assumes that an .env file is present. I haven't worked extensively enough with docker that I know all of those things by heart so it would have been nice to make it explicit. Take for example this docker command: docker compose up -d. We could make it more explicit as follows: docker compose --env-file .env up -d. Which leads me to:

The solution

Expanding on the explicit command from before we can actually provide it with another environment file by just repeating the --env.file parameter! The result? docker compose --env-file .env --env-file .env.local up -d. We got to repeat this for all the docker compose commands, which is a tad bit bothersome. So make sure you check your up script to amend (the 3) docker compose commands with the addition of all the env files you want to give it. This also needs to be done for the down script. Now ideally I would have used the env_file option within the docker compose yaml file, but this one has a different use case. env_file within the yaml is used for containers and the --env-file parameter from the CLI command is used for compose actions. To run your xmcloud instance locally we need the CLI command so we're stuck with the --env.file option.

Suggestions for .env.local parameters

I want to leave you with a couple suggestions on which parameters to put in a local env file:

• HOST_LICENSE_FOLDER is a great one, because that way nobody has to have a dedicated folder to put their license file in.
• SITECORE_API_KEY_xmcloudpreview is another good candidate so you don't put API keys in source control (or the git history)
• JSS_EDITING_SECRET for the same reason as above