@ifaxity/env

The minimal enviroment variable package for modern Node.js environments. No dependencies.

Node 6 or above is required as ES6 is needed.

Code heavily based on dotenv package on npm

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Installation

npm install @ifaxity/env --save

or if you use yarn

yarn add @ifaxity/env

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Usage

To use the module just require it like this

const env = require('@ifaxity/env');

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API

Example .env file:

# Node environment
NODE_ENV=production

# Example database connect options
DB_HOST='localhost'
DB_PORT=27017

# Decimals can also be used
PI=3.14

# Booleans too
DEBUG=true

# Multiline strings (must be double quoted strings)
MULTILINE="Hello\nWorld!"

env

The module is a proxy object so you can use this to get an environment variable and also convert it to the correct type. As node.js doesn't support process.env to have any other values other than strings for now.

Types parsed are limited to boolean, number, string for now. If the variable doesnt exist then null is returned.

Like this:

Consider the variables in the example file above

const env = require('@ifaxity/env');
env.NODE_ENV // same as process.env.NODE_ENV.

env.PORT // returns 3000 (as a number)
env.BOOL // returns true (as a boolean)

// Can also use the object deconstruction syntax
const { NODE_ENV, PORT, TRUE } = require('@ifaxity/env');

However parse & config is reserved as functions in this module.

env.config([, opts])

Configures and loads the environment variables from a file.

Returns the parsed variables in a form of an object. However unlike the module these variables are not proxied.

Parameters

• opts {Object} - Optional options. If any of the optional options is not of a valid type or if its value is not valid then a TokenError will be thrown.

  • encoding {String} - Encoding to use when reading the env files. Encoding types are defined in the nodejs documentation

  • path {String|Array} - Full path to the directory to look for files. Files are loaded in order of .env, .env.${NODE_ENV} and .env.local. If a overwriting the earlier files if there are duplicate keys. Default value is the current working directory.

  • env {Object} - Object to set the config options to. Default value is process.env.

  • defaults {Object} - Object to set default values if a key doesn't exist in the .env file. Default value is null.

Basic Usage

const env = require('@ifaxity/env');

// Basic usage
env.config();

// Custom path & variable
const envVars = env.config({
  path: __dirname,
  env: {},
});

env.parse(data)

Parses a key=value pair string to an object of variables

Returns an object of the key=value pairs of the data

Parameters

• data {String} - Data to parse in a key=value pair format.

Basic Usage

const env = require('@ifaxity/env');

const envVars = env.parse(fs.readFileSync(process.cwd() + '/.env', 'utf8'));