Automatically creates an .env.example/.envrc.example which creates the same keys as your .env or .envrc file, but without the values.
There are projects which make use of an .env or .envrc file. These files contain environment variables which are used during runtime, such as API keys.
A typical .env file might look like this:
OPENAI_KEY="12345"
S3_BUCKET_NAME="testbucket"A typical .envrc file looks very similar, but as it's mounted by direnv automatically it needs to be prefixed with export:
export OPENAI_KEY="12345"
export S3_BUCKET_NAME="testbucket"An .env or .envrc file should not be commited into a repo, since it can contain sensitive information1 (you should probably add them into your .gitignore). However, one needs to know which variables can be set in the file and as a result, a lot of projects (such as laravel), provide an example file which is a template file. So you would copy the .env.template, rename it to .env and fill in the environment variables.
However, there is one issue with this approach: If one introduces a new environment variable, they need to remember to add it to the .env.example or .envrc.example file. Unfortunately, if they forget this, it will not be noticed, since the program is using the .env file and not the .env.example. This pre-commit hook tries to mitigate this problem by creating an example file automatically (based on your .env/.envrc file), so the example file would become the following example:
OPENAI_KEY=""
S3_BUCKET_NAME=""And for .envrc an .envrc.example file:
export OPENAI_KEY=""
export S3_BUCKET_NAME=""See pre-commit for instructions
Sample .pre-commit-config.yaml
...
- repo: https://github.com/Cloudmeesters/clean-direnv
rev: v0.0.7
hooks:
- id: clean-dotenv
...The tool looks for .env and .envrc files in all directories and creates a new, corresponding filename .env.example which is save to commit, since it contains all the keys from your .env/.encrc file, but without its values.
As a result, you always have an up-to-date .env.example or .envrc.example file. This shall help to reduce forgetting updating the .example files!
Since a .env file is probably in the .gitignore file, we cannot rely on pre-commits files-filter. Instead, we tell pre-commit to run always. We then check for each subdirectory if an .env or .envrc file exists. If it exists, we automatically create an .example file.