Over my last two react projects I've had to work with API from Google Developer Console. API keys contain sensitive information even when you're going through the implementation sample on npmjs you're advised not to push the code with API keys to GitHub.

Since I'm using npm mostly I always have to push my code to GitHub especially when $ npm start doesn't run I don't know the correlation but whenever I have this challenge once I've committed my code to GitHub npm start runs successfully.

So I wasn't sure where to hide my config folder with the JSON file when I wanted to consider hiding on .gitignore I wasn't sure if Netlify would deploy well without the API keys on the GitHub repo.

Luckily I came across the conversation on Twitter and thought I could compile some solutions that work well for other developers:

• storing the API keys on the .env, for example, API_KEY = 123bc then use the variable to refer to the API and add it to .gitignore

• deploy to Netlify you can use netlify CLI or alternatively you can configure the environment variables on Netlify when deploying your projects.

proxying API keys on lambda/ Netlify functions

• use of vaultproject.io which manages secrets and sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API.

It stores all app passwords, API keys and you can retrieve them but its expensive for small projects

• storing environment variables as 'secrets' on GitHub repo.

Interestingly there are GitHub features that will warn you or help you clean the repo when you accidentally commit sensitive keys like GitGuardian detected an API key from Google that alerted me.

sops is a great tool to share API with other contributors if you're working as a team.

Hoping this will also be helpful to you. You can share other API key handling tips especially for react projects.