Configuration through process.env in the spirit of TypeScript
This is a placeholder for an idea I want to build. It is the next evolution of my config-twelve module.
Street standard for Node.js configuration is using environment variables (see third factor). It is also common practice to use dotenv for development. The problem is that it is weak typed and requires lots of handling for validation. How many times have you had a issue with missing or invalid environment variables? For example:
process.envforces all of it's properties to be strings.- I use
process.env.BASE_URLin my config and locally providehttps://127.0.0.1:8080but another engineer deploys to production withhttps://prod.com/(notice the trailing slash). Did I write logic to account for this? - Dealing with truthy and falsey values can be tricky. If
process.env.LOG_TRANSACTIONS === undefinedis that false? What aboutprocess.env.LOG_TRANSACTIONS === 'yes'? - Windows env variables are case-sensitive, while in Linux the aren't
- Forgot to setup a new environment variable when deploying
I aim for config-typed to provide a TypeScript module that:
- Requires you to define env variables for the application (even if optional)
- Throws fatal exception for missing (required) variables
- Validates the variables (strictly typed)
- Supports defaults for optional
- Gives benefits of IDE auto complete afforded by TypeScript