Introduction to loadEnv

The loadEnv utility offers a streamlined approach for managing environment variables in Node.js applications. With support for environment-specific files, schema validation, and advanced options like overriding variables, loadEnv ensures your app's configuration is reliable and secure.

Key Features

• Automatic Environment Selection: Automatically loads .env files based on the NODE_ENV variable (e.g., .env.test, .env.production).
• Schema Validation: Validates environment variables against a schema, ensuring type safety and required fields.
• Flexible Override Behavior: Allows control over whether existing environment variables are overridden.
• Multiple File Support: Supports loading multiple .env files, merging their variables.
• Automatic Parsing: Automatically parses JSON-like strings, arrays, booleans, and numbers.
• Debugging Options: Enables verbose logging for debugging during development.
• Comment and Invalid Line Handling: Gracefully ignores comments and invalid lines in .env files.
• Encoding Customization: Supports custom file encoding (default is utf8).
• Variable Interpolation: Expands variables with values from other variables (e.g., PATH=$HOME/bin).
• Backward Compatibility: Works seamlessly with existing process.env variables.
• Default Fallback: Falls back to the default .env file when NODE_ENV is not set or the corresponding file is missing.
• Non-blocking Errors: Does not throw errors when .env files are missing, unless explicitly instructed.
• Priority Control: Gives precedence to NODE_ENV-specific files over the default .env.

Quick Start

To begin, create a .env file in the root of your project directory:

API_KEY="your-api-key"

Using the loadEnv:

import { loadEnv } from "vkrun"
 
loadEnv()
console.log(process.env.API_KEY) // "your-api-key"

Note: VkrunJS does not restrict you from using external modules, such as dotenv, if needed.

Explore advanced configurations and additional options in the following sections.