modenv is a tool to update and keep consistent multiple .env files.
It is designed to be extremely user-friendly, with helpful error messages, and importantly,
no operation is destructive without explicit opt-in (with -f flag.)
cargo install modenv
This is a quick overview of the most important commands. These should cover the vast majority of your day to day usage.
modenv init
If you already have dotenv files for your project, you can skip this command. This command touches .env.example, .env, and .env.production files in the current folder. It additionally adds the appropriate lines to your .gitignore file, creating a .gitignore if it does not exist.
modenv -a PORT=3000 HOST=0.0.0.0
This adds PORT=5000 and HOST=0.0.0.0 to the first env file found, searching in order only for .env.local, .env.development, and .env. The -a flag causes this to additionally add the key with a blank value to all other found files, keeping them consistent. If the key already exists, this operation will fail unless -f is also passed.
Next, add values to .env.production (specified by -p):
modenv -p HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=5000
modenv also has two commands to ensure your .env files are all consistent with each other. These previous commands
assume the add subcommand, which is the default if no subcommand is provided.
modenv audit
This shows us any env variables that are missing. You can specify a reference file using -p for .env.production,
-n for the bare .env file, -d for .env.development, -x for .env.example, or -e
If we want to update those missing keys with blank values, just re-run with -f:
modenv audit -f
It's helpful to keep every file in the same order. Re-arrange .env.example how you like, and use the following:
modenv order
Don't worry, if you've already re-arranged .env, you can use it as the reference file.
modenv order -n .env.example
This operation warns if re-ordering would delete any data, and it requires an -f flag to overwrite if any data would be lost.