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best-practices.md

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Best practices

  • Always use flat structure in JSON files (create logical hierarchy in your app when building config with loader)
  • For config keys, use CAPITALIZED_WITH_UNDERSCORES case, as is conventional for env variables
  • Keep all variables used by loader in you default config, add to VCS. Store default values or placeholders. It will be a perfect starting point for custom configs.
  • Keep your configuration interface minimal. If you don't need to configure parameter for different environments, use constant parameter without loader.
  • Even though you can use plain JSON for config values, prefer JSONc and add comments to your variables.
  • Keep your .env.jsonc well structured and well documented. Setting up the configuration should not require thorough prior knowledge of the implementation.

When to use placeholder, when default value?

Examples:

  • Setting default of SQL_PORT to 5432 is a good idea if you are using PostgreSQL. Similarly for MySQL, a reasonable default value would be 3306
  • Default 3000 for your HTTP server might be reasonable, if it is a convention of your developer team and/or its is wired e.g. in your Dockerfile anyway. Developers can still change it collides with any local running processes.
  • Using credentials to your testing infrastructure as a default is wrong, even though it would make setup for developers easier in some scenarios. It would be confidential info in your repo history.

Recommended structure for .env.jsonc

{
  // Server
  "SERVER_PORT": 3000,

  // Development
  "LOGGER_PRETTY": false, // colorful formatted logs
  "DEV_ERRORS": false, // if true, return error details, including stack trace (affects only response, full details are always logged)

  // Logging
  "LOGGER_DEFAULT_LEVEL": "debug" // silent, fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace
}
  1. If you find your configuration file harder to navigate through, use sections seperated by a newline with a comment
  2. If name is not self-explanatory, use brief comment to explain how is the value interpreted
  3. Do not include tautological comments ("SERVER_PORT": 3000, // server port)