by Nicholas C. Zakas

If you find this useful, please consider supporting my work with a donation.

A utility for verifying that environment variables are present in Node.js, Deno, and Bun. The main use case is to easily throw an error when an environment variable is missing. This is most useful immediately after a Node.js or Deno program has been initiated, to fail fast and let you know that environment variables haven't been setup correctly.

Install using npm or yarn:

npm install @humanwhocodes/env

# or

yarn add @humanwhocodes/env

Import into your Node.js project:

// CommonJS
const { Env } = require("@humanwhocodes/env");

// ESM
import { Env } from "@humanwhocodes/env";

By default, an Env instance will read from process.env.

Import into your Deno project:

import { Env } from "https://cdn.skypack.dev/@humanwhocodes/env?dts";

By default, an Env instance will read from Deno.env.

Install using this command:

bun add @humanwhocodes/env

Import into your Bun project:

import { Env } from "@humanwhocodes/env";

By default, an Env instance will read from process.env.

It's recommended to import the minified version to save bandwidth:

import { Env } from "https://cdn.skypack.dev/@humanwhocodes/env?min";

However, you can also import the unminified version for debugging purposes:

import { Env } from "https://cdn.skypack.dev/@humanwhocodes/env";

By default, an Env instance will read from an empty object.

After importing, create a new instance of Env to start reading environment variables:

const env = new Env();

// read a variable and don't care if it's empty
const username = env.get("USERNAME");

// read a variable and use a default if empty
const username = env.get("USERNAME", "humanwhocodes");

// determine if a variable exists
const usernameExists = env.has("USERNAME");

// read the first found variable and use a default is empty
const username = env.first(["USERNAME", "USERNAME2"], "humanwhocodes");

// read a variable and throw an error if it doesn't exist
// or is an empty string
const username = env.require("USERNAME");

// read the first found variable throw an error if none exist
const username = env.requireFirst(["USERNAME", "USERNAME2"]);

To retrieve more than one required environment variable at one time, you can use the required property with destructuring assignment:

const env = new Env();

// throws if variables are undefined or an empty string
const {
    CLIENT_ID,
    CLIENT_SECRET
} = env.required;

In this example, an error is thrown if either CLIENT_ID or CLIENT_SECRET is missing or an empty string. The required property is a proxy object that throws an error whenever you attempt to access a property that doesn't exist.

If you don't want to throw an error for environment variables containing an empty string, use the exists property:

const env = new Env();

// throws only if variables are not defined
const {
    CLIENT_ID,
    CLIENT_SECRET
} = env.exists;

You can also specify an alternate object to read variables from. This can be useful for testing or in the browser (where there is no environment variable to read from by default):

const env = new Env({
    USERNAME: "humanwhocodes"
});

// read a variable and don't care if it's empty
const username = env.get("USERNAME");

// read a variable and throw an error if it doesn't exist
const password = env.require("PASSWORD");

Last, you can specify custom error classes to throw for the two different types of errors: key not found and empty string. Each error constructor is passed the string key that caused the error. Here's an example:

class MyKeyNotFoundError extends Error {
    constructor(key) {
        super(`Yo this key isn't here: ${key}.`);
    }
}

class MyEmptyStringError extends Error {
    constructor(key) {
        super(`Hey! This key is empty: ${key}.`);
    }
}

Env.KeyNotFoundError = MyKeyNotFoundError;
Env.EmptyStringError = MyEmptyStringError;

Note that changing the error classes affects all instances of Env, both those that are already created and those that will be created within the same lifetime.

1. Fork the repository
2. Clone your fork
3. Run npm install to setup dependencies
4. Run npm test to run tests

BSD 3-Clause