Managing Secrets and Environment Variables

It's common that you will need to use sensitive information or environment-specific variables inside your Edge Functions. You can access these using Deno's built-in handler

Local Development#

When developing functions locally, you will be able to load environment variables in two ways:

1. Through a default .env file placed at supabase/functions/.env, which will get loaded on supabase start
2. Through the --env-file option for supabase functions serve, for example: supabase functions serve --env-file ./path/to/.env-file

To perform a one-time setup of your local development secrets, use the first option to create the .env file that will apply to all functions.

Default secrets#

By default, Edge Functions have access to these secrets:

• SUPABASE_URL: The API gateway for your Supabase project.
• SUPABASE_ANON_KEY: The anon key for your Supabase API. This is safe to use in a browser when you have Row Level Security enabled.
• SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY: The service_role key for your Supabase API. This is safe to use in Edge Functions, but it should NEVER be used in a browser. This key will bypass Row Level Security.
• SUPABASE_DB_URL: The URL for your PostgreSQL database. You can use this to connect directly to your database.

Local secrets#

Let's create a local file for storing our secrets, and inside it we can store a secret MY_NAME:

This creates a new file ./supabase/.env.local for storing your local development secrets.

Now let's access this environment variable MY_NAME inside our Function. Anywhere in your function, add this line:

Now we can invoke our function locally, by serving it with our new .env.local file:

When the function starts you should see the name “Yoda” output to the terminal.

Production secrets#

Let's create a .env for production. In this case we'll just use the same as our local secrets:

This creates a new file ./supabase/.env for storing your production secrets.

Let's push all the secrets from the .env file to our remote project using supabase secrets set:

You don't need to re-deploy after setting your secrets.

To see all the secrets which you have set remotely, use supabase secrets list: