Mastering Modular JavaScript

Chapter 6. Development Methodology and Philosophy

Even though most of us work on projects with source code that is not publicly available, we can all benefit from following open source best practices, many of which still apply in closed-source project development. Pretending all of our code is going to be open source results in better configuration and secret management, better documentation, better interfaces, and more maintainable codebases overall.

In this chapter, we’ll explore open source principles and look at ways to adapt a methodology and set of robustness principles known as The Twelve-Factor App (generally devised for backend development) to modern JavaScript application development, frontend and backend alike.¹

6.1 Secure Configuration Management

When it comes to configuration secrets in closed-source projects, like API keys or HTTPS session decryption keys, it is common for them to be hardcoded in place. In open source projects, these are typically instead obtained through environment variables or encrypted configuration files that aren’t committed to version-control systems alongside our codebase.

In open source projects, this allows the developer to share the vast majority of their application without compromising the security of their production systems. While this might not be an immediate concern in closed-source environments, we need to consider that once a secret is committed to version control, it’s etched into our version history unless we force a rewrite ...