Why does this beat a .env file?

[rjmk]

Is it because it's more node-y / self-contained than a bash-y .env?

[nelsonic]

Go on...

[rjmk]

Well the main way I've seen of managing environment variables is with a .env file and maybe a porduction.env file. In them, the environment variables are just listed out as

A_VARIABLE=xyz
...

A simple way to run this is with some of the Heroku command line tools (but this is not very self-contained) but the fact that it's almost a sequence of shell commands means it would be simple to write a script to turn it into one. However, I suppose that's not necessary for a node app.

[nelsonic]

@rjmk we could easily support a .env file.
in fact I prefer it to a .json file.
Do you have time to write a PR?

[nelsonic]

Possible sources of inspiration:

• https://github.com/grimen/node-env-file
• https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv

Differentiator: ours will have 100% test coverage (aka reliability).

[rjmk]

Sorted!