configurable empty values
rossvz opened this issue · 5 comments
Is there any way to configure which specific values are allowed to be empty? For example, on my local machine my DB password is '' (empty string), but I want to ensure that we don't accidentally set a production DB password, or other ENV variables to empty string, since those could cause failure.
Perhaps this could be implemented with allowEmptyValues to either be a boolean or an array of env keys?
require('dotenv-safe').config({ allowEmptyValues: [ 'DB_PASSWORD' ] })
I like the idea, and I will think about it. Another option might be to also allow passing in a function that returns true/false based on the key name or something like that.
That's an interesting idea too. Ideally you could have some pattern matching/regex on the input, so something like:
require('dotenv-safe').config({ allowEmptyValues: [ 'DB_*' ] })
Of course, if it's a validator function, that logic could be implemented by the user.
The snippets above wouldn't work with ES6 imports.
Why not let the value be empty by default as long as it's explicitly written in the .env? I mean, suppose we have .env.example like this:
DB_PASSWORD=
Then, as far as .env contains a line DB_PASSWORD=, we may assume it's intentionally empty. On the other hand, if it's simply not present, throw the error as usual.
On second thought, I'm not convinced that needing an empty password is a good enough use case to warrant this feature. Empty credentials are a security anti-pattern, as it's trivial to generate random credentials.
If anyone feels strongly about this or has another use case for it, happy to talk about it.
@rolodato I need this for a use-case with a token for external error reporting in my prod apps, and the development env won't have it.