dotguard

Production-ready environment variable validation and parsing for Node.js applications.
Strict, typed, and super configurable — so your apps never run with busted configs again.

🚀 Features

• 🔥 Runtime validation with full TypeScript support
• 🔢 Supports string, number, boolean, and array types
• 🎯 Optional defaults & required variable enforcement
• 🎨 Beautiful CLI reporting with actionable feedback
• 🧩 Multi-file .env support (.env.defaults, .env.local, etc.)
• 🐳 Docker environment detection
• 📜 JSON schema generation for external tools
• 🔍 Detects unused environment variables to keep configs clean

📦 Installation

npm install dotguard


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🛠️ Quickstart

1. Define your config schema

Create a dotguard.config.ts at your project root:

import { defineEnv } from 'dotguard'

export default defineEnv({
  schema: {
    PORT: {
      type: 'number',
      default: 3000,
      description: 'Server port'
    },
    DATABASE_URL: {
      type: 'string',
      required: true,
      description: 'Database connection string'
    },
    FEATURES: {
      type: 'array',
      separator: ',',
      default: ['auth', 'api'],
      description: 'Enabled features'
    },
    DEBUG: {
      type: 'boolean',
      default: false,
      description: 'Enable debug mode'
    }
  },
  dotenv: true,
  files: ['.env.defaults', '.env', '.env.local'],
  docker: true,
  strict: true
})

2. Load and validate environment variables at runtime

import { createEnv } from 'dotguard'

const env = await createEnv<{
  PORT: number
  DATABASE_URL: string
  FEATURES: string[]
  DEBUG: boolean
}>()

console.log('Server running on port:', env.PORT)

3. Use the CLI for validation & tooling

# Validate your environment files
npx dotguard check

# Output parsed config as JSON
npx dotguard dump

# Generate JSON Schema file
npx dotguard gen-schema


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🎯 Why dotguard?

Dotguard ensures your app configuration is bulletproof.
No more silent failures due to misconfigured env variables.
Get full typing, runtime validation, and awesome CLI feedback out of the box.


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📄 License

MIT