expand-envvars

expand-envvars recursively walks a configuration object and expands any ${VARIABLE}s it finds in strings. Objects are modified in-place and only object's own enumerable properties are considered. Simple arrays are also supported.

The library can be useful e.g when running servers with a complex configuration inside Docker containers when one needs only a part of the configuration file – such as database parameters – to be easily configurable for each container.

Undefined variables are replaced with an empty string.

Example

Assuming environment variables

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306
DB_NAME=testdb
DB_USER=root

the following code

const expand = require('expand-envvars')
const config = expand({
  database: {
    client: mysql
    connection: {
      host: ${DB_HOST}
      port: ${DB_PORT}
      user: ${DB_USER}
      password: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      database: ${DB_NAME}
    }
  }
}, {
  substitute: {
    'DB_PORT': value => parseInt(value)
  }
})

will result in the following config:

{
  database: {
    client: mysql
    connection: {
      host: 'localhost',
      port: 3306,
      user: 'root',
      password: '',
      database: testdb
    }
  }
}

Here a custom substitution function was specified for DB_PORT in order to convert it to an integer.

Usage

Expansion is called as expand(what, options), where first parameter is the object to be considered and options is an optional object customising the expansion.

Currently the only option property is substitute, which can be either a function or an object.

If substitute is given as a function, it will be called as substitute(variable, value) for each environment variable and its value before the replacement is made. The actual value replaced will then be the return value of substitute.

If substitute is given as an object, for each environment variable a key with the same name is checked and if found to be a function, called as substitute[variable](value) and return value used as replacement as above.