Nodemailer - Error: Missing credentials for "PLAIN" at SMTPConnection._formatError

Question

I'm trying to get my hands dirty with Nodemailer and I am getting the above error message. If I set up my email address and password as plain text then the app works fine, obviously I would rather not do that as I will be pushing to Github, so I have set them up as environment variables as below, unfortunately this leads to the above error message.

I have set up my Gmail account to allow less secure apps.

I have also tried to create a secret.js file with the data in, imported it into app.js and added it to my .gitignore, the issue there is when I try to deploy to Heroku, I guess Heroku has to have access to that file to run the script so it crashes.

let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    service: 'gmail',
    secure: false,
    port: 25, // true for 465, false for other ports
    auth: {
        user: process.env.EMAIL, // generated ethereal user
        pass: process.env.PASSWORD // generated ethereal password
    },
    tls: {
        rejectUnauthorized: false
    }
});

I have set my environment variables thusly and none of them work:-

set EMAIL=email@email.com
set EMAIL='email@email.com'
set EMAIL="email@email.com"

I've also used single quotes with ${} hoping this might help, but nope. Completely baffled.

Answer 1

You need to add this require in email verification file

require("dotenv").config();
var transport = nodemailer.createTransport({
              service: "hotmail",
              auth: {
                      user: process.env.EMAIL_ID,
                       pass: process.env.PASS
                    });

Answer 2

It's not recognizing your env variables. Where is your server.js file located in relation to the env file? Put them in the same directory.

Answer 3

Let say you're about to upload a bundle to Firebase using their Cloud Functions for Firebase from function folder. Then you .env file has to be in the root of functions, in order not to return undefined.