Environment Variables made easy

This module is helpful if you have environment variables that get loaded in different way, depending on where the code is run. For example, if your tests run in a place where the environment isn't bootstrapped with all the required variables, but your production code runs in a place that is, this will help you out.

After you configure the module, and call .get('ENV_VAR_NAME'), the module first looks in process.env (the environment) to see if the variable is there. If it's not found there - and assuming you've set this module up to know where a .env file is - it will try to load the variable from .env

Example Usage

// path is node's handy internal module for normalizing filepaths
var path = require('path');

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, '../../my_project_root');
var fileName = '.env';

var envVars = new EnvironmentVars(filePath, fileName);
var apiKey = envVars.get('SUPER_AWESOME_API_KEY');

Above, the envVars variable is configured to search for a file full of environment variables, located at __dirname, '../../my_project_root/.env'. An example .env file would look like this:

TEST_API_URL=http://localhost:4989
SUPER_AWESOME_API_KEY=xxxx-yyyy-zzzz

Passing in .env isn't required. The default is .env, so you really only need to pass in a 2nd option to the constructor if you use a file of a different name.

Performance Considerations

The module will cache the environment variable file after it's read from disk the first time. If you'd like to force it to re-read from disk, call the _resetCache method.

Contributing

PR's welcome :)