Node Config

Returns a config object using environment vars. If a .env file exists at the root of the project, it will load that to set environment vars. Returns the nconf instance which has get/set/merge. https://github.com/indexzero/nconf

Here is the order of the merging done by nconf:

1. Defaults
2. Environment vars
3. Memory
4. Overrides

By default, only defaults are set and environment vars are retrieved.

The calling application can update the defaults, set settings to the memory store using config.set() or config.merge() and also set up overrides which will always take precedence over memory or environment vars.

Note that with nconf, a colon - ':' - is the default key separator and it's possible to get/set deep into objects by using a colon in the key.

i.e.

config.get( 'mongo:uri' ); // 'mongodb://localhost/test'

Setup

It is expected to load this module before anything else in your app. It will setup New Relic monitoring if process.env.NEW_RELIC_HOME is set. Note that this must be an actual environment var and not part of a .env file because we want to be able to instrument even the dotenv module.

import config from '@rmarscher/config';

That config object is ready to go with our standard defaults and could be just used out of the box.

We recommend at least setting the app name for the log:

config.set( 'log:name', 'my-app' );

Another way to setup the config is to use the config.setup(defaults, overrides) method. This will completely clear out all of the existing config and set it up again. The defaults will be merged with the standard defaults.

Environment Vars

Use two underscores __ to nest paths and create sub-objects. So an envrionment var database__host=127.0.0.1 would cause require( '@rmarscher/config' ).get( 'database' ) to return { host: '127.0.0.1' }.

It's expected to load this before anything else in the app. It will also read environment variables in from a .env file using the dotenv package.

One thing to be careful about with environment variables is everything is treated as a string. You can get a falsey value by setting the environment variable to an empty string:

express__cors=

Therefore, it's important that anything that consumes a config setting handle casting it appropriately. For booleans, it's recommended to use just an if ( config.get( 'somevar' ) ) so truthy/falsey values will work.

Setting express__cors=false or express__cors=0 in a .env or environment var will not evaluate to false. It's very important to remember this.

Similarly, numeric values could be strings if set from env vars, so you must use something like parseInt() or Number() to make sure to convert strings to numbers.

Standard Defaults

Here are the standard defaults currently in use. The express, newrelic and port config are required for the @rmarscher/express-init module. The log config is required for the @rmarscher/log module.

The paths config is used by the requireLocal() function in the @rmarscher/globals module. Given requireLocal() can't work with ES6 modules, we may phase that out. Although, it might be still fairly handy until we can figure out if the ES6 import paths to check can be configured.

    var standardDefaults = {
        express: {
            cors: false,
            paths: {
                'static': path.resolve( process.cwd(), './public' ),
                'views': path.resolve( process.cwd(), './app/views' ),
            },
            trustProxy: true,
            viewEngine: 'hbs'
        },
        log: {
            file: null,
            level: 'info',
            name: 'log', // maybe there's a way to get the calling app's name from package.json
            stream: process.stdout
        },
        mongo: {
            uri: 'mongodb://localhost/test',
            log: false,
            options: {
                db: {
                    safe: true
                },
                socketOptions: {
                    keepAlive: 1
                }
            }
        },
        newrelic: newrelic ? true : false,
        paths: {
            'code': path.resolve( process.cwd(), './app' ),
            'public': path.resolve( process.cwd(), './public' ),
            'tests': path.resolve( process.cwd(), './test' ),
        },
        port: process.env.PORT || 8080,
        // NodeMailer SMTP Transport settings
        smtp: {
            // host: 'smtp.mandrillapp.com',
            port: 587,
            // auth: {
            //     user: '',
            //     pass: ''
            // },
            // default is 5, trying a higher value
            'maxConnections': 15,
            'maxMessages': Infinity
        },
        versionPrefix: '/v1'
    };