Enveloped is an alternative for dotenv, more feature-rich out of the box, with pretty simple configurations.

Requirements

At the moment, Enveloped it's a zero-dependencies package.

The .env file must be in JSON

Installation and usage

In an initialized project, run:

npm i enveloped

Then, on the main file, add this lines:

import enveloped from "enveloped";
enveloped.init();

I strongly recommend to put them at the top of all.

Now, every time you need an env variable, use the process.var function:

/* .env content
{
	"CURRENT": {
		"STAGE": "testing"
	}
}
*/

let envStage1 = process.var("CURRENT.STAGE");
console.log(envStage1); //-> testing

// Also valid

envStage = process.var("CURRENT").STAGE;
const { STAGE } = process.var("CURRENT");

Configuration

You can pass a custom configuration through enveloped.init(config), where config is an object with:

• rootPath: directory path where the .env file/s are located. (default: process.cwd())
• filename: JSON env file name. (default: .env)
• type: if filename is not supplied, this property will load append to the file name a type. It's a nice-to-have when working with different env files, depending on the stage. (default: empty string) (example: type: "development", loaded file: .env.development)
• secretKey: the secret key used to encrypt the .env content. It must have only 32 characters (default: it generates a random on initialization).
• debugMode: if something is not working correctly, this mode will output some help logs to the console. (default: false)

All of this properties are optional. It's important to notice that type will be ignored if filename is supplied.

How it works?

When you call enveloped.init(), the script will:

1. Merge the configs, in case you supplied a custom one.
2. Setup debugMode if it's true.
3. Configure the process node object, adding the var function.
4. Setup the secret key for the encryption.
5. Get, validate and parse the env file.
6. Encrypt a minified version of the env file to a hash.
7. Save the hash in a env variable called NODE_ENVELOPED.

As you can see, there will only be one env variable, containing a hash.

Now, every time you call process.var("<varName>"), it will:

1. Read the NODE_ENVELOPED hash.
2. Decrypt it and convert it to an object.
3. Search the var.
4. Return the value if it finds it, or null if not.

Of course, the varName can be chained with dots like: "KEY.CHAINED", to refer a nested key.

For an in-depth guide or reference, you can visit the Wiki.

Licence

Enveloped is under Mozilla Public Licence 2.0 so, obviously, it is open-source. More info at Mozilla MPL 2.0

Made by Juan Saez