# ENV Provider
When building an application, you may want different configuration based upon the environment your code is running in.
To fulfill this requirement, Expresswebjs uses the dotenv library.
Inside the root of every new Expresswebjs project, you’ll find an .example.env file.
You can create your .env file and set up you environment configuration. To do that on terminal, run:
cp example.env .env
Many important configuration values are defined using the .env file that exists at the root of your application. Your .env file should not be committed to your application's source control, since each developer / server using your application could require a different environment configuration. Furthermore, this would be a security risk in the event an intruder gains access to your source control repository, since any sensitive credentials would get exposed.
Expresswebjs helps you have a maintainable codebase by providing a dedicated location for storing application configuration which is the config directory.
You can access configuration values in the App/Config directory.