Purchase Option Extension environment

[HunkyBill]

Inside the Shopify-rendered code for this extension, how can we tell if we accessing it via a development session or a live production session? Is there a way to know? What is the most common pattern for this? We write one version of the code, and it has to function in both a development sense and a production one.

process and process.env as common ways to handle this do not exist in the Shopify extension, so what do people do?

[ElanaK · Accepted solution]

Since the extension isn't a actually running in a Node environment, `process.env` doesn't quite work out of the box, but our CLI team has used made it possible to use the `process.env.SOME_VAR` syntax in your code to access environment variables from a `.env` file. So, you can't access the whole `process.env` object (it doesn't actually exist in an extension), but if you add  `MY_ENV` or something like that to an `.env` file and then use `process.env.MY_ENV` in your code, you can get your environment (and any other environment variables you set in the same way). Hope that helps!

[tysonjallen]

I can't seem to get this to work. `process.env.MY_ENV` doesn't get changed during build/dev with the cli and I get a console error `process not defined` in the browser.

Are there any examples I can reference?