ZEN ENV

Simple and flexible approach to loading environment variables.

How is this different than Dotenv?

• ZEN ENV loads earlier, so there's no special handling needed for Rails apps.
• The .zenv file is Ruby, which allows for more flexibility.
• Env vars should specify the Rails env, not the other way around.
• Does not support overrides via multiple .zenv files. If you want to share env vars across multiple namespaces, it's Ruby, DRY it up.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'zenv'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install zenv

Create a .zenv or .zenv.rb file at the root of your project:

{
  default: {
    KEY: 'value',
    ...
  },
}

The :default namespace will be loaded into ENV.

To load a different set of environment variables, add another "namespace":

{
  default: {
    KEY: 'value',
    ...
  },
  other: {
    KEY: 'other value',
    ...
  }
}

Specify the namespace in ZENV. E.g. ZENV=other rails console.

If environment variables need to be loaded before your application is loaded, run the command with zenv. For example, if you're running the puma web server and it depends on PORT, run zenv puma.

You probably don't want the default namespace loaded for tests. Create a "test" namespace and put this at the top of your tests (if using RSpec, put it at the top of spec_helper.rb):

ENV['ZENV'] = 'test'
require 'zenv'

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. 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/austinthecoder/zenv.