Investigating various patterns for managing configuration and environment variables in Next

[eric-burel]

Managing configuration based on environment variables can be confusing in Next, especially if you've be using Next before the introduction of .env file support in 9.4. Multiple approaches are possible to set a variable depending on its nature: secret or public, server-only or shared with the client, hard-written or dynamic...
Examples can be your app current version, your Stripe secret, the domain of your website, the name of your company...

I've just published an article about the patterns I've identified working on Aplines and Vulcan Next, and their use cases: https://blog.vulcanjs.org/how-to-set-configuration-variables-in-next-js-a81505e43dad

In the future, I also hope to share our configuration validation patterns based on this when they are more robust!