Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

Today I wanted to reference a value from .env in an NPM script, so I learned how!

I wanted a script I could run from the editor console of cassey-til.glitch.me, that would hit a Netlify webhook to rebuild cassey.dev. It's important that only I can run the script, though, so I can't just put the URL right in package.json where anyone can see it.

I know that on Glitch, .env is a safe place to keep secrets. So, I stored my webhook URL there, like NETLIFY_BUILD_URL='secret'.

Then I added a line to package.json's scripts section to run the curl command that activates the webhook. It took some research to get the syntax right, but eventually I had "publish-dev": "curl -X POST -d {} $NETLIFY_BUILD_URL", and it worked!

Gonna run it as soon as I finish this post, so that this post will appear on both cassey-til.glitch.me, and cassey.dev/til. Huzzah!