Environment Variables

Ecewo has built-in env parser, which is dotenv-c. Let’s see how it works.

First, create a .env file in the root directory of your project. Project structure should be like this:

├── ecewo/
├── .env
└── src/
    ├── main.c
    └── CMakeLists.txt

We define a PORT in .env:

src/.env

PORT=4000

Let’s parse it in main.c:

src/main.c

#include "ecewo.h"
#include "dotenv.h"

int main()
{
    env_load(ENV, false);               // Load ".env" file
    const char *port = getenv("PORT");  // Get the "PORT"
    printf("PORT: %s\n", port);         // Print the "PORT"

    ecewo(4000);                        // Start the server
    return 0;                           // Exit
}

We’ll see the PORT in the console when building the program. However, getenv returns a const char * everytime, and if we need to retrieve a non-character type variable, we must convert it first.

For example, ecewo() takes an unsigned short type variable. So, if we want to use the PORT from the .env file, we can do it like this:

src/main.c

#include "ecewo.h"
#include "dotenv.h"

int main()
{
    env_load(ENV, false);

    const char *port = getenv("PORT");
    const unsigned short PORT = (unsigned short)atoi(port);

    ecewo(PORT);
    return 0;
}