Sentaku

sentaku (Japanese) -- noun -- selection; choice; option

A simple, minimalist config manager for Node.js projects.

Installing

$ npm i --save sentaku

Why Sentaku

One of the simplest ways to use a config in a Node.js project is to require a config.js file that exports a JS object:

// config.js
module.exports = {
  key: 'value',
  simple: true
}

// app.js
var conf = require('./config.js')

console.log(conf.simple)

Sentaku is that, plus support for NODE_ENV-specific configs and a little pathing goodness.

This approach has numerous benefits:

• Configuration as code -- configs are JS objects, so you can do javascript-y things like generating keys with getters
• No synchronous filesystem reads to find and access configs
• No parsing libraries to turn your configs into a native javascript object for consumption... because your configs are already a native javascript object

Sentaku is intentionally minimalist. If you would like more features in your config manager, I encourage you to check out the many great configuration modules out there.

Using Sentaku

// node_modules/sentakuConfs/default.js
module.exports = {
  key: 'val'
}

// any file in app
var conf = require('sentaku')

• Put configs in node_modules/sentakuConfs (or symlink that path to your config dir)
• Default config values in default.js
• Env-specific overrides in {env}.js -- no fuzzy-matching, so NODE_ENV=dev matches dev.js not development.js
  • Sentaku assumes NODE_ENV is dev unless otherwise specified
• Access config values with property accessors

If you've ignored the entire node_modules directory with .gitignore, you'll likely want to amend that so sentakuConfs gets committed:

# .gitignore
node_modules/*
!node_modules/sentakuConfs

Regarding Security, Configs, and Version Control

Don't put private info (e.g. your AWS Secret Key) in version-controlled configs that might end up in public repos.

If you commit sensitive info to any public repo, consider it compromised. If this happens, you should always generate a new key or password. You can mitigate the damage by following GitHub's instructions here, but even then you should still probably generate a new key or password.

For open-source projects that interact with private apis/keys/passwords, consider creating a default.js.example in your config dir with blank values and committing that file while adding your actual default.js to your .gitignore.

License

Mit. See license.