Nvar

If your app relies on lots of environment secrets, onboarding's tough. New team members need to add credentials for fifty different services and configure no end of app settings through their environment. Worse still, if a merged PR introduces something new, it can lead to inconvenient and unpredictable errors. Nvar helps keep your team in step by making sure all necessary environment variables are set.

You can use Nvar in Ruby apps, with out-of-the-box support provided for Rails.

Add the gem to your Gemfile and install it with bundle add nvar. If you're not on Rails, you'll need to make sure that Nvar is required with require 'nvar', and then manually call Nvar.load_all as early as is appropriate.

It's recommended to do this by adding the following to config/application.rb:

require "dotenv/load" # if using in tandem with dotenv
require "nvar"

Nvar.load_all

Nvar is configured by way of config/environment_variables.yml. If you're on Rails, this file will be created for you automatically. Each key corresponds to the name of a required environment variable, and houses its configuration, all of which is optional.

REQUIRED_ENV_VAR:
  required: false # defaults to true
  type: Integer # defaults to String
  default_value: 8
  filter_from_requests: true # defaults to false
  passthrough: true # defaults to false

• required determines whether an error will be raised if the environment variable is unset during initialization.
• type determines which type the variable will be cast to on load.
• default_value decides the value of the environment variable if it's absent.
• filter_from_requests is potentially the most exciting of the bunch - it integrates with the vcr gem. If your environment variable is a secret that's used directly (e.g. in bearer token authentication), use true. If it's used on its own as the password for basic auth, use alone_with_basic_auth_password. To activate the filtering, configure VCR as follows:

VCR.configure do |config|
  Nvar::EnvironmentVariable.filter_from_vcr_cassettes(config)
end

Now, if you use VCR to record a request, that credential will be hidden using vcr's #filter_sensitive_data hooks.

This is just a glimpse of Nvar's greater aim - centralizing configuration for your environment variables as much as possible. Doing so enables you to onboard developers easily, and makes it easier to hide environment variables from logs and files.

The final config option, passthrough, deserves some extra detail. By default, Nvar sets your environment constants to their actual values in development and production environments, and to their names in test environments, in order to prevent your tests from depending on their values.

In production/development, or in test with passthrough active:

irb(main):001:0> REQUIRED_ENV_VAR
=> "set"

In test:

irb(main):001:0> REQUIRED_ENV_VAR
=> "REQUIRED_ENV_VAR"

Your tests shouldn't be reliant on your environment, so setting passthrough to true in config/environment_variables.yml isn't recommended. Passthrough is, however, useful for recording VCR cassettes. Set NVAR_PASSTHROUGH to a comma-separated list of environment variable names while running your tests, then unset it and run your tests again to make sure they're not reliant on your environment. For example:

NVAR_PASSTHROUGH=GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY,GITHUB_APP_INSTALLATION_ID bundle exec rspec

Now that you've been through and configured the environment variables that are necessary for your app, Nvar will write your environment variables to top-level constants, cast to any types you've specified, and raise an informative error if any are absent.

Nvar works well with gems like dotenv that source their config from a .env file. If an environment variable is unset when the app initializes and isn't present in .env, it will be added to that file. If a default value is specified in your Nvar config, that will be passed to .env too.

When using gems such as dotenv, make sure you load those first so that the environment is ready for Nvar to check.

This Rake task provided by Nvar is super helpful for your project's developer experience. Based on what's currently in the environment, it'll show any environment variables that are missing and add declarations for them to .env. And if you've set a default_value in your config, that'll get written too.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/boardfish/nvar. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Nvar project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.

This gem isn't associated with sneakertack/nvar.