shark-env-guard

🔒 A lightweight, zero-dependency (except dotenv) utility to validate required environment variables at startup.
Fail fast if any critical config is missing — before your app crashes in production!

✨ Features

• ✅ Validates that required env vars exist and are not empty
• ✅ Auto-loads .env file using dotenv
• ✅ Exits process immediately on missing vars (safe for production)
• ✅ Optional: throw error instead (great for testing)
• ✅ Zero runtime dependencies (only dotenv as peer)
• ✅ Tiny, readable, and well-documented

📦 Install

npm install shark-env-guard

🚀 Usage (ES Modules)

Make sure your package.json has "type": "module".

Place this at the very top of your main file (e.g., server.js, index.js):

import { envGuard } from 'shark-env-guard';

`💡 Note: This package is published as an ES Module. If you're using CommonJS (require), you'll need to use dynamic import:`

const { envGuard } = await import('shark-env-guard');

// Ensure these env vars are present before starting the app
envGuard(['PORT', 'MONGO_URI', 'JWT_SECRET']);

🧪 In Tests (throw error instead of exiting)

import envGuard  from 'shark-env-guard';

try {
  envGuard(['API_KEY'], { throwOnError: true });
} catch (err) {
  console.error('Missing config:', err.message);
}

💡 Why Use This?

Without validation, your app might:

• Crash minutes after deployment
• Leak secrets due to misconfiguration
• Connect to the wrong database

shark-env-guard fails fast during startup — so you catch config issues before they cause downtime.

📁 How It Works

1. Automatically loads .env (via dotenv)
2. Checks if all variables in your list exist and are non-empty
3. If any are missing → logs error and exits process (or throws if throwOnError: true)

📜 License

MIT © Ali Elsharkawy