dotenv-safer
v1.0.0
Published
Forked from dotenv-safer - Load environment variables from .env and ensure they are defined
Downloads
2,162
Readme
dotenv-safer
Identical to dotenv
, but ensures that all needed environment variables are defined after reading from .env
.
The names of the needed variables are read from .env.example
, which should be committed along with your project.
dotenv-safer
only checks if all the needed variable names exist in process.env
after initializing. It does not assume anything about the presence, format or validity of the values.
Installation
npm install --save dotenv-safer
yarn add dotenv-safer
Example
# .env.example, committed to repo
SECRET=
TOKEN=
KEY=
# .env, private
SECRET=topsecret
TOKEN=
// index.js
require('dotenv-safer').config();
Since the provided .env
file does not contain all the variables defined in
.env.example
, an exception is thrown:
MissingEnvVarsError: The following variables were defined in .env.example but are not present in the environment:
TOKEN, KEY
Make sure to add them to .env or directly to the environment.
If you expect any of these variables to be empty, you can use the allowEmptyValues option:
require('dotenv-safer').config({
allowEmptyValues: true
});
Not all the variables have to be defined in .env
; they can be supplied externally.
For example, the following would work:
$ TOKEN=abc KEY=xyz node index.js
Usage
Requiring and loading is identical:
require('dotenv-safer').config();
This will load environment variables from .env
as usual, but will also read any variables defined in .env.example
.
If any variables are already defined in the environment before reading from .env
, they will not be overwritten.
If any variables are missing from the environment, a MissingEnvVarsError
will be thrown, which lists the missing variables.
Otherwise, returns an object with the following format:
{
parsed: { SECRET: 'topsecret', TOKEN: '' }, // parsed representation of .env
required: { SECRET: 'topsecret', TOKEN: 'external' } /* key-value pairs required by .env.example
and defined by environment */
}
If all the required variables were successfully read but an error was thrown when trying to read the .env
file, the error will be included in the result object under the error
key.
dotenv-safer
compares the actual environment after loading .env
(if any) with the example file, so it will work correctly if environment variables are missing in .env
but provided through other means such as a shell script.
Preloading
You can use the --require
(-r
) command line option to preload dotenv-safer.
By doing this, you do not need to require and load dotenv in your application code.
This is the preferred approach when using import instead of require.
$ node -r dotenv-safer/config your_script.js
See the dotenv README for more information.
Continuous integration (CI)
It can be useful to depend on a different set of example variables when running in a CI environment.
This can be done by checking if the CI
environment variable is defined, which is supported by virtually all CI solutions.
For example:
require('dotenv-safer').config({
example: process.env.CI ? '.env.ci.example' : '.env.example'
});
Options
Same options and methods supported by dotenv
.
require('dotenv-safer').config({
allowEmptyValues: true,
example: './.my-env-example-filename'
});
allowEmptyValues
If a variable is defined in the example file and has an empty value in the environment, enabling this option will not throw an error after loading.
Defaults to false
.
example
Path to example environment file.
Defaults to .env.example
.
Motivation
I regularly use apps that depend on .env
files but don't validate if all the necessary variables have been defined correctly.
Instead of having to document and validate this manually, I prefer to commit a self-documenting .env.example
file that may have placeholder or example values filled in. This can be used as a template or starting point for an actual .env
file.