client vars are hard-coded by EnvironmentPlugin; can't be changed at launch time

[jedwards1211]

Issue - Bug

• OS: OSX / Linux / Windows / ? OSX
• Node version: 5.10.1
• NPM version: 3.9.6
• RethinkDB version: 2.3.0 (CLANG 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.29))

I'm building my app into a Docker container. Typically one wants to be able to run a Docker container on any server by simply changing environment variables like HOST. However, this would break the client bundle which has other values hard-coded in by EnvironmentPlugin. There's no way to deploy the app on a different host without rebuilding the js bundles. (One could build the js bundles in the docker container when it's launched, but that goes against docker best practices).

As a solution (I will PR soon) I propose turning off the process polyfill in the webpack config with node { process: false } and injecting our own process polyfill script in the Html SSR that includes desired environment variables from the server side. That way the process.env variables on the client side would always match those the server was run with.

[mattkrick]

very true. we've deployed action using dokku & although the devops isn't documented, you can see how we've handled environmental vars here https://github.com/ParabolInc/action/blob/master/webpack/webpack.config.prod.js#L9

[jedwards1211]

That's the same as in meatier, right?
Check out my PR, I think you'll like it.