Environment Variables in Vercel, Supabase, and Netlify — The Right Way
Platform-specific guides for managing environment variables in production
13 min readsecurity, environment-variables, vercel, supabase, netlify, deployment
You've got your secrets in .env files locally. Your code reads them via process.env. Everything works in development. But now you need to deploy — and your .env file doesn't go with your code (that's the whole point). So how do your production servers get the secrets they need?
Every hosting platform has a system for this. Let's walk through the three most popular platforms for vibe coders and make sure you're doing it right.
Vercel
Vercel is the default hosting choice for most Next.js projects, and its environment variable system is straightforward.
Adding Environment Variables
Via the Dashboard:
- Go to your project in the Vercel dashboard
- Navigate to Settings > Environment Variables
- Add each variable with its name and value
- Select which environments it a
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