smart-env

📦 Smart Environment Variable Manager

smart-env is a lightweight Node.js utility that loads and validates environment variables from .env files, ensuring correct types and required fields.

🚀 Features

• ✅ Schema-based validation (required fields, type enforcement)
• 🔄 Auto-coercion (convert "true" to true, "42" to 42, etc.)
• 🛠 Fallback defaults if variables are missing
• 📂 Multiple environment support (.env.development, .env.production)
• 🔥 CLI support to validate env files
• 📌 TypeScript support (optional)

📥 Installation

npm install smart-env

🛠 Usage

1️⃣ Define your environment variables

Create a .env file in your project root:

API_KEY=my-secret-key
PORT=4000
DEBUG=true

2️⃣ Use smart-env in your project

const { loadEnv } = require('smart-env');

const schema = {
  PORT: { type: 'number', required: true, default: 3000 },
  DEBUG: { type: 'boolean', default: false },
  API_KEY: { type: 'string', required: true },
};

const config = loadEnv(schema);
console.log(config);

3️⃣ Run CLI to validate environment variables

npx smart-env

✅ If everything is set up correctly, you'll see:

✅ Environment variables loaded successfully: { PORT: 4000, DEBUG: true, API_KEY: 'my-secret-key' }

❌ If a required variable is missing, it will throw an error:

❌ Error: Missing required env variable: API_KEY

⚙️ API

loadEnv(schema: object): object

Loads and validates environment variables based on the schema.

Schema Definition

const schema = {
  VARIABLE_NAME: { type: 'string' | 'number' | 'boolean', required: true/false, default: any }
};

CLI Usage

npx smart-env

🧪 Running Tests

npm test

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

👨‍💻 Author

Created by Maitreyi Chatterjee. Feel free to contribute!