Envchecker

A command-line tool to verify that the environment variables used in your code through files like constants.js or config.ts are being documented in other files like:

• [x] .env.example
• [x] README.md
• [ ] Dockerfile (not yet)
• [ ] docker-compose.yml (not yet)
• [ ] helm values.yml (not yet)

Installation

npm install -g envchecker-cli@latest

or

yarn global add envchecker-cli@latest

Usage

The tool receives the path to a source file where the environment variables are being used.

// file: src/constants.js
const baseUrl = process.env.API_BASE_URL;
const prefix = process.env.API_PREFIX;
const dbUser = process.env.DB_USER;
const dbName = process.env.DB_NAME;
const dbPassword = process.env.DB_PASSWORD;
const dbHost = process.env.DB_HOST;

export default {
    baseUrl,
    prefix,
    db: {
        user: dbUser,
        password: dbPassword,
        host: dbHost,
        name: dbName
    }
};

It also receives the path to the file we want to check whether documents those variables or not.

# file: .env.example
DB_NAME=postgres
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PASSWORD=

On the terminal type:

> envchecker --src=./src/constants.js --check-env=.env.example

and for this case, the output is:

How does it work

Envchecker scans your source file and seeks process.env declarations. Then it keeps a list of the declarations found and searches for them in the target file, scanning the file line by line.

If you use a third-party package to read environment variables and export them automatically as configuration objects to your code as the package nconf does. Then, in that case, this package won't work.

Command options

• --version
  • Display the package version
• --source, --src
  • The path to the source code file where the environment variables are being read
• --check-env, --ce
  • The path to the target file to check that the environment variables used are documented
• --help
  • The command's help

Author

• Rodrigo Martinez Diaz (@_rodrigomd)