@bark/dotenv

A dependency free env file reader and writer for Node.js

About

There already exists a pretty good library for reading .env files. @bark/dotenv, however, aims to provide an extra level of validation and consistency with the implicit .env file standard. A .env file should be sourceable in a shell script, which means that certain extra restrictions (as well as some additional lax-ness) need to be adhered to.

Values with spaces in them need to be quoted, otherwise this is a syntax error. In addition, escaped quotation marks inside of quoted sections should be printed literally in the interpreted value. Shell scripts also allow quoted sections within strings (e.g. my" value" is valid, equal to the string "my value")

Philosophy

Libraries like @bark/dotenv are all about making life easier for developing and deploying - if something goes wrong, you don't want to spend an age tracing through config files trying to figure out where the error is. If something goes wrong loading your configs, @bark/dotenv tells you excactly why it failed, and where the error happened so that you can keep the development loop tight and not waste time

Usage

To read a .env formatted string

const { reader } = require('@bark/dotenv')
const values = reader(`
APP_KEY=123
# This one gets changed a lot
FOO_BAR=https://localhost:8001
`)

console.log(values) // { "APP_KEY": "123", "FOO_BAR": "https://localhost:8001" }

Roadmap to v1.0.0

@bark/dotenv aims to offer a complete suite of tools for dealing with .env files - not just reading them. Each feature is one step closer to completion, but wont be considered complete until it also has a comprehensive test suite to accompany it

• [x] Read .env file string into dumb object
• [ ] Read .env file into editable representation
• [ ] Save .env file from editable representation
• [ ] Disk I/O
• [ ] Format Verification