gen-envex - Generate .env.example

🔒 Automatically generate a .env.example from your .env file by removing all secret values while preserving variable names, comments, and formatting.

🔗 Quick Links

• Repository: https://github.com/AniketDey06/gen-envex
• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gen-envex

✨ Features

• 🔐 Removes all secret values automatically
• 📝 Preserves comments and blank lines
• 📄 Keeps environment variable names intact
• ⚡ Simple CLI with zero configuration
• 📂 Supports custom input and output files
• 🖥️ Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

📖 Why use gen-envex?

Your .env file contains sensitive information such as API keys, database passwords, and tokens, so it should never be committed to Git.

However, your teammates still need to know which environment variables are required.

gen-envex automatically creates a safe .env.example by stripping all values while preserving the structure of your original file.

📥 Example

Input (.env)

# Database configuration
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=5432
DB_PASSWORD=supersecret123

# API Keys
STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=sk_live_abc123
NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=https://api.example.com

Output (.env.example)

# Database configuration
DB_HOST=
DB_PORT=
DB_PASSWORD=

# API Keys
STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=

📦 Installation

Install globally

npm install -g gen-envex

Install as a development dependency

npm install --save-dev gen-envex

Use without installing

npx gen-envex

📄 Standalone Script

If you prefer not to install gen-envex, you can use the standalone script instead.

Simply download or copy generate-env-example.js into your project and run it directly with Node.js.

Code Link - https://github.com/AniketDey06/gen-envex/blob/main/generate-env-example.js

node generate-env-example.js

You can also integrate it into your project's package.json scripts.

{
  "scripts": {
    "gen:env": "node generate-env-example.js",
    "dev": "node generate-env-example.js && next dev"
  }
}

This keeps your .env.example up to date every time you start your development server—without installing the CLI globally or as a project dependency.

🚀 Usage

Basic usage

Generate .env.example from .env in the current directory.

gen-envex

or

npx gen-envex

Custom input and output

gen-envex --input .env.local --output .env.example

gen-envex --input config/.env --output config/.env.example

📜 package.json Scripts

Generate manually

{
  "scripts": {
    "gen:env": "gen-envex"
  }
}

Run:

npm run gen:env

or

pnpm gen:env

or

yarn gen:env

Generate automatically before development

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "gen-envex && next dev"
  }
}

Now every time you run:

npm run dev

(or pnpm dev / yarn dev), your .env.example will always stay up to date.

⚙️ CLI Options

| Option | Description | |---------|-------------| | --input | Path to the source .env file | | --output | Path where .env.example will be generated |

Example:

gen-envex --input .env.local --output .env.example

✅ Behavior

gen-envex preserves your file structure while removing sensitive values.

• ✅ Removes all environment variable values
• ✅ Preserves comments (# ...)
• ✅ Preserves blank lines
• ✅ Preserves variable order
• ✅ Ignores invalid lines without =
• ✅ Supports both Unix (\n) and Windows (\r\n) line endings

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

If you'd like to improve gen-envex, feel free to:

• Open an issue

• Submit a pull request

• Suggest new features

• Repository: https://github.com/AniketDey06/gen-envex (Do leave a ⭐)

👨‍💻 Authors

• Aniket Dey - https://aniketdey.in
• Arun Mondal - https://github.com/ArunKM-Git

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.