Envar

Envar is a small shim between the ENV variables which are a pain to mock, and your app which needs to act differently according to environments. Under the covers Envar uses the Dotenv gem, which loads environmental variables from a .env file in your development environment. Envar does not so much, but it does it in a way that makes your life much easier!

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'envar'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install envar

Envar was built to just work with Rails. If you are running in a development or a test environment, Envar will auto-load the .env file. Those variables will be available on the top level constant:

With the Rails.env = 'development' and a .env file like so:

FACEBOOK_TOKEN=fb-for-life-YO

Variables from the .env file will be loaded into the ENV variables space. Even better, the top level Envar space provides a helpful shim for accessing these variables so that you don't have to get all angle brackety.

Envar.facebook_token
# => fb-for-life-YO

# or the uglier uppercase version, if you prefer
Envar.FACEBOOK_TOKEN
# => fb-for-life-YO

This is a lot easier to work with in tests. For example, in rspec it looks like this:

Envar.stub(:facebook_token).and_return('my_great_token')

In ordinary circumstances you would need to set the ENV variables or assume in test knowlege about the .env variable. Or worse, stub out the :[] angle bracket methods. Try not to barf a little in your mouth if you are in that ugly situation. Instead, be happy with Envar.

For extra configuration stuff, checkout the section below that details what to do without some Rails.

Set the Envar environment by hand:

Envar::Config.environment = 'development' # or whatever

The development and test environment will trigger the loading of the local .env file. In other environments it is expected that you will have real environmental variables set.

If you find you would rather set .env files in other environments, you can configure which environments should load the .env file:

Envar::Config.load_environments = ['development', 'staging']
# => ['development', 'staging']

# or to modify the defaults which are ['development', 'test']

Envar::Config.load_environments << ['staging']
# => ['development', 'test', 'staging']

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request