A Learning Moment

When I originally added a Google tag to my mkdocs.yml file, I thought everything was fine and dandy. After reading the docs, I added the string G-XXXXXXXXXX, and away I went. But later, I realized I should be protecting the tag by using an environment variable. So, I removed it and forgot about it for a while.

But now we're back! The leaves are falling, the sun is setting earlier, and it's time to roast some pumpkin seeds. So I thought, hey, I should go back and add Google Analytics with an environment variable. Here we are....

My Approach

Since I'm deploying my site using Netlify, I learned about a pretty cool feature! Turns out, you can add an environment variable directly in Netlify. So I added my key GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY with the value (G-XXXXXXXXXX - my Google Analytics property ID).

I then input !ENV GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY into mkdocs.yml file, commited my changes, and pushed them.

Bada bing bada boom!

Even More New Lessons

But wait, there's more! I got an error message: !ENV YAML. What does this mean? My tag works correctly. I even tested it out. It turns out it could have been an extension or linter I was using.

To resolve the issue, all I did was add !ENV to the list of recognized tags in VS Code's YAML settings.

Ok, now I can say bada bing bada boom!