Documenting .env files for nodejs Projects

The original post is published on my Blog at mrsauravsahu

Note: There's a video version available where I actually build this project and deploy it to npmjs: https://youtu.be/4N1lwa6w6HA

Documentation of any sort looks like an overhead at the time, but pays off really well for projects that need to be maintained for a long time, when teams change, when onboarding new members, and a whole lot others.

For nodejs projects, application configuration is usually read from process.env which in turn, come from a place like ENVIRONMENT variables or a configuration file like .env. During development, this package dotenv is a great tool to set your environment variables.

Documentation is Key

For large projects with even larger teams, code-base changes constantly and so does the configuration. So documentation is key to keep anyone who uses the code-base later.

A typical .env file looks like this (it's a collection of key=value pairs)

# The Node environment
NODE_ENV=development

# Url to a third party service
API_SERVICE_URL=https://mrsauravsahu.tech/posts/41/file

Since the value could contain sensitive information, to document this, we should ideally omit the value from each key=value pair and add this template of sorts to source control, which look something like the example below:

# The Node environment
NODE_ENV=

# Url to a third party service
API_SERVICE_URL=

What did I build?

I created an npm package which generates these template .env files from the real .env file, called gen-env-template.
This is a dev tool so you can install it as a devDependency.

# Use your favorite package manager to install this. (You can use npx to run directly as well)
npm i -D gen-env-template

Now that we have the package, we can pass in the .env file we're using and path to the outfile file. For example, if this is our input file -

➜ cat .env
# The Node environment
NODE_ENV=

# Url to a third party service
API_SERVICE_URL=

We can generate our template file with this command

➜ ./node_modules/.bin/gen-env-template .env template.env

Now we get the generated template file

➜ cat template.env
# The Node environment
NODE_ENV=

# Url to a third party service
API_SERVICE_URL=

Now, this template.env file can be safely committed to source control as all secrets have been omitted. You can find the Github repository for this project here - mrsauravsahu/gen-env-template on Github