endrekrohn/monorepo-env-loader

A devcontainer-script for loading environment-variables into a monorepo from a toml-file 🔑🎉

Load environment variables into a monorepo from a toml-file

Sometimes it can be beneficial to have environment-files (*.env) at different levels in your monorepo.

To motivate this thought I'll go through a short example.

Example

Say you are launching a Next JS application using both a docker-compose.yml-config at the root of the repo, and a separate command at the applications folder. This could typically happen if you would want to run yarn dev inside the application folder, in addition to being able to launch the whole stack using docker compose.

docker-compose.yml
.env

web/
    services/
        app/
            .env.local
        other-app/
            .env

In this case you would need to define the environment variables for all your applications one by one, unlike when using only docker compose. This is especially bothersome once the number of applications inside your monorepo grows.

To ease the process of onboarding new developers (reducing the number of .env-files to set up) it would therefore be beneficial to only require one file. My solution to this problem is then using a single .toml-file to define the hierarchy of environment variables.

[".env"]
  SECRET="hush"
[web]
  [web.services]
    [web.services.app] 
      [web.services.app.".env.local"] 
        SECRET="top-secret"
        TOKEN="shhh"
    [web.services.other-app] 
      [web.services.other-app.".env"] 
        AREA_52="tonopah-test-range"

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Demonstration

Below is demonstration of loading .env-files upon creating a devcontainer.