complex-dotenv-json

Load environment variables via a JSON file

npm install complex-dotenv-json

This is a drop-in replacement for the dotenv-json package, with support for complex JSON objects.

Usage

Define your environment variables in .env.json in the root of your project (or wherever you start your node process):

{
  "public_api_key": "s@Mpl3_d@Ta",
  "secret_api_key": "s@Mpl3_d@Ta_SECRET",
  "database": {
    "host": "localhost",
    "port": 5432,
    "user": "postgres",
    "password": "postgres"
  }
}

Note that in the example above, the database section is a nested object. This is not able to be stored in a tree structure in environmental variables, so instead it is stored as a JSON string. It can easily be accessed by the following code:

// Parses the JSON string into an object
const database = JSON.parse(process.env.database);

// Access the object properties
console.log(database.host); // "localhost"
console.log(database.port); // 5432

Load your environment variables at the beginning of your program:

require("complex-dotenv-json")();

console.log(process.env.public_api_key) // => s@Mpl3_d@Ta

N.B. Existing keys in process.env will not be overwritten.

You can customize the location of your .env.json file by passing a path option:

const dotenvJSON = require("complex-dotenv-json");
dotenvJSON({ path: "./config/example.json" });