Support port numbers as strings (maybe?)

[fabiospampinato]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'd like to write the cleanest code possible, and I think it's pretty common to want to write something like this:

app.listen ( process.env.APP_PORT );

The thing is that process.env.* variables are always strings, so I need to wrap that in Number:

app.listen ( Number ( process.env.APP_PORT ) );

Describe the solution you'd like

Maybe app.listen should accept a string for a port too just for this use case? Like it obviously should be a number ideally, but maybe accepting strings for making this cleaner and more express-compatible is worth it?

Describe alternatives you've considered

Wrapping those env variables in Number.

[fabiospampinato]

It seems that a port as a string works just the same, in some sense the types are kind of wrong then 🤔 I think it'd like to see this minor thing changed.

[talentlessguy]

imo it's not quite safe to allow ports to be passed as strings because someone can do this:

app.listen('bruh')

which is not good

proper way to load port from env is to do this: app.listen(parseInt(process.env.PORT, 10))

[fabiospampinato]

That's too noisy IMO, I think it's ok to throw if the thing passed to once piped to parseInt doesn't become a number > 0.

But I'm ok with this being a number too, the resulting code is just a bit less clean.