Configure the Environment

TT Time Tracker uses two environment files:

File	Used by
.env	Vue frontend (Vite) — values are inlined at build time
.env.backend	NestJS API and BullMQ worker — loaded at runtime

Client environment (.env)

Copy from .env.example:

cp .env.example .env

Variable	Required	Default	Description
VITE_API_URL	Yes	http://localhost:3000	Base URL of the API. Change to your production API URL for production builds.
VITE_APP_VERSION	No	0.0.0	Version string shown in the UI.
VITE_APP_BASE_URL	No	http://localhost:5173	Public base URL of the client. Used for OAuth redirects.

WARNING

VITE_* variables are inlined at build time. If you change them, you must rebuild the frontend. They are visible in the compiled JavaScript — do not put secrets here.

Backend environment (.env.backend)

Copy from .env.backend.example:

cp .env.backend.example .env.backend

Required

Variable	Description
DATABASE_URL	PostgreSQL connection string, e.g. postgresql://tt:password@localhost:5432/tt?schema=public
POSTGRES_PASSWORD	Password for the postgres Docker container (must match DATABASE_URL)
REDIS_URL	Redis connection string, e.g. redis://localhost:6379
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET	Session signing secret. Generate with openssl rand -base64 32. Minimum 32 characters.
BETTER_AUTH_URL	Public URL of the API, e.g. http://localhost:3000. Used for OAuth redirect URIs.
RUSTFS_ACCESS_KEY	Access key for the S3-compatible file store.
RUSTFS_SECRET_KEY	Secret key for the S3-compatible file store.

Google OAuth (required for login)

Variable	Description
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID	OAuth client ID from Google Cloud Console
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET	OAuth client secret

Create credentials at console.cloud.google.com → APIs & Services → Credentials → Create OAuth 2.0 Client. Set the authorized redirect URI to {BETTER_AUTH_URL}/api/auth/callback/google.

File storage

Variable	Default	Description
RUSTFS_ENDPOINT	http://localhost:9000	S3-compatible storage endpoint
RUSTFS_BUCKET	tt-invoices	Bucket name for invoice files

In production you can point this at AWS S3 or MinIO by changing RUSTFS_ENDPOINT and using the appropriate credentials.

Invoice OCR (optional)

Variable	Description
OPENAI_KEY	OpenAI API key for extracting structured data from OCR text
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS	Path to a GCP service account JSON file with Cloud Vision API access

Without these, uploaded invoices will remain in a pending state and no OCR extraction will occur.

Observability (optional)

All observability integrations are no-ops when their environment variables are unset — safe to skip in local development.

Variable	Description
SENTRY_DSN	Sentry DSN for backend (api + worker) error tracking
SENTRY_DSN_FRONTEND	Sentry DSN for frontend error tracking (returned via /config)