Environment variables for TaskFlow services

Each TaskFlow service reads its configuration from a dedicated .env file at startup. You must create and populate these files before running docker-compose up. The variables control database connections, authentication secrets, third-party email credentials, and API routing. Docker Compose injects the values into each container at build or runtime as appropriate.

JWT_SECRET must be identical in user-service/.env and task-service/.env. If the values differ, the task service will reject all tokens issued by the user service, and authenticated requests will fail across the stack.

User Service
Task Service
Notification Service
Frontend

Create user-service/.env with the following variables:

MONGO_URI=mongodb://mongo-user:27017/TaskManagerUser
JWT_SECRET=your-secret-here
JWT_EXPIRES_IN=7d
ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@example.com
ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-admin-password
PORT=5001

Variable	Required	Description
`MONGO_URI`	Yes	Connection string for the user MongoDB container.
`JWT_SECRET`	Yes	Secret used to sign and verify JSON Web Tokens. Must match `task-service`.
`JWT_EXPIRES_IN`	No	Token expiry duration. Defaults to `7d` if not set.
`ADMIN_EMAIL`	Yes	Email address for the seeded administrator account.
`ADMIN_PASSWORD`	Yes	Password for the seeded administrator account.
`PORT`	Yes	Port the user service listens on inside the container. Set to `5001`.

MONGO_URI is pre-configured for the Docker Compose internal network. The hostname mongo-user resolves to the mongo-user container automatically — do not change it unless you are running the service outside of Docker Compose.

Create task-service/.env with the following variables:

MONGO_URI=mongodb://mongo-task:27017/TaskManager
JWT_SECRET=your-secret-here
PORT=5002

Variable	Required	Description
`MONGO_URI`	Yes	Connection string for the task MongoDB container.
`JWT_SECRET`	Yes	Secret used to verify tokens issued by the user service. Must match `user-service`.
`PORT`	Yes	Port the task service listens on inside the container. Set to `5002`.

MONGO_URI is pre-configured for the Docker Compose internal network. The hostname mongo-task resolves to the mongo-task container automatically — do not change it unless you are running the service outside of Docker Compose.

Create notification-service/.env with the following variables:

EMAILJS_PRIVATE_KEY=your-emailjs-private-key
EMAILJS_PUBLIC_KEY=your-emailjs-public-key
EMAILJS_SERVICE_ID=your-emailjs-service-id
EMAILJS_TEMPLATE_ID=your-emailjs-template-id
PORT=5003

Variable	Required	Description
`EMAILJS_PRIVATE_KEY`	Yes	Private API key from your EmailJS account.
`EMAILJS_PUBLIC_KEY`	Yes	Public API key from your EmailJS account.
`EMAILJS_SERVICE_ID`	Yes	The service ID of your configured EmailJS email service.
`EMAILJS_TEMPLATE_ID`	Yes	The template ID for the notification email template in EmailJS.
`PORT`	Yes	Port the notification service listens on inside the container. Set to `5003`.

All four EmailJS credentials are available in your EmailJS dashboard under Account and Email Services.

Both frontend applications use the same environment variable. Create .env files in each frontend directory:task-manager-user-frontend/.env:

VITE_API_URL=http://localhost:5000/api

task-manager-frontend/.env:

VITE_API_URL=http://localhost:5000/api

Variable	Required	Description
`VITE_API_URL`	Yes	Base URL of the API Gateway. All frontend API calls are routed through this address.

This value is consumed at build time by Vite and baked into the static bundle. If you change the API Gateway port or deploy behind a reverse proxy, update this variable and rebuild both frontend images.

Get Started

Core Features

Deployment

Developer Guide

Environment variables for TaskFlow services

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get Started

Core Features

Deployment

Developer Guide

Documentation Index

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love