Run Configuration Generator

How to install

npm i -g runconfig-generator

How to use

Add entries to the script section of your package.json. E.g.:

{
  "name": "example project",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "unit-tests": "mocha ./test"
    "start": "node index.js"
  }
}

Go to your project folder and run runconfig-generator.

How to specify environment variables

Global variables
Create a .env file in your project for variables that shall be used by ALL run configurations.

Script-specific variables
Create a folder called .env-files in your project for variables that should only be used for a certain run script.
In this folder create files named after your run scripts with a .env extension.
For the package.json example above, you could create .env-files/unit-tests.env and .env-files/start.env.

.env files are optional and will only be taken into consideration when using the below provided dotenv-code in your project (for npm run ...) or when the --env-flag is being passed (for WebStorm Run Configurations).
If you specify the same variable in the global .env and a script-specific.env one, the script-specific variable will be used.

If you want to load the environment variables when running the scripts using e.g. npm run myscript and not just using the WebStorm GUI, then add this to the very beginning of your projects source code:

const dotenv = require('dotenv')
if (process.env.npm_lifecycle_event) { // if run using npm
    dotenv.config({silent: true, path: `./.env-files/${process.env.npm_lifecycle_event}.env`}) // load script specific env vars from .env-files folder
    dotenv.config({silent: true}) // load global env vars from .env file
}

If you want to load the environment variables when running the scripts using the Run Configuration GUI in WebStorm, you can have to pass the --env flag:
runconfig-generator --env
This will embed the env vars in the Run Configurations.

Clean Run Configurations before generating new ones

If you want to delete all old Run Configurations before generating the new ones you can pass the --clean flag.
Note: If a Run Configuration is generated it will always automatically overwrite the old one if the old one was also generated (no matter if --clean has been set).

How it works

This tool parses your package.json's script section and uses the entries to create npm run configuration files (or node or mocha configuration files if the script begins with a mocha or node command) under .idea/runConfigurations in your project so that WebStorm will automatically recognize them.