Replace .env with a single environment variable holding all the configurations, easily configurable via an HTML Form

[felladrin]

The configurations via .env are growing too fast. At some point, it would be easier to manage the app configuration via an admin panel.

The admin panel can be accessed via the app's /configurations. No password is required, as it's just a page with a form that is used to generate a configuration string that can be saved in an environment variable and passed to the docker container.

This generated configuration string would be a JSON (encoded with Base64 to avoid problems with quotes) that users could easily copy and paste from.

It would make it easier to describe what each configuration does and easy to display the data. Also, it would allow configurations that use arrays (which is not easy to do in a .env)

Suppose we have the following JSON configuration:

{
  "search": {
    "enabled": true,
    "maxResults": 30
  },
  "filters": [
    "active",
    "featured"
  ]
}

When we encode this JSON in Base64, it will look like this:

ewogICJzZWFyY2giOiB7CiAgICAiZW5hbmxlZCI6IHRydWUsCiAgICAibWF4UmVzdWx0cyI6IDUwCn0sCiAgImZpbHRlcnMiOiBbCiAgICAiYWN0aXZlIiwKICAgICJmZWF0dXJlZCIKICBdCn0=

So this is what users would easily copy from the /configurations page to pass to their container:

MINISEARCH_CONFIGURATION="ewogICJzZWFyY2giOiB7CiAgICAiZW5hbmxlZCI6IHRydWUsCiAgICAibWF4UmVzdWx0cyI6IDUwCn0sCiAgImZpbHRlcnMiOiBbCiAgICAiYWN0aXZlIiwKICAgICJmZWF0dXJlZCIKICBdCn0="

As the Base64 is reversible, it would be easy to prefill the /configurations form with the current configuration, the next time a user accesses it.

---

Functions to use:

function base64Encode(str) {
  return btoa(unescape(encodeURIComponent(str)));
}

function base64Decode(str) {
  return decodeURIComponent(escape(atob(str)));
}