Why I Don't Use Environment Variables

Environment variables are very helpful for software development as they allow you to easily change certain aspects of your application based on the environment in which your application is used. However, environment variables do have some challenges which can cause some issues in certain scenarios. In this article, I’ll explore some of those challenges and explain why I don’t use environment variables in my applications.

Globally Available

The first challenge with environment variables is the fact that they are globally available to all applications. The main problem this can cause is naming conflicts between applications. For example, if two applications both have an API token to some service (i.e. npm), you have to choose different names for the environment variables as a generic name like NPM_TOKEN would cause a conflict between the two applications. This might seem like a contrived example but it is actually one that I have faced at my job and it has caused some serious annoyances.

Shell Specific

Another challenge with environment variables is that they are only available in the shell which you have configured them for. Again, this might not seem like a big deal, but if you have to switch between shells on occasion this can be a real pain as the variables are not shared by both shells and must be maintained in each shell.

Difficult To Find

Because environment variables are configured in a file such as ~/.bashrc it is harder to determine the value of each environment variable quickly. Although an minor inconvenience, it still adds to the list of challenges with environment variables.

My Solution

My solution to this is to use .env files to store environment variables on a per-application basis. These files are not shell specific and they work across platforms. Additionally, .env files are stored alongside your application code making it very easy to view and change the environment variables for your application.

Loading .env files into your application can be done manually or using a package such Node’s dotenv package. Other languages have similar packages such as Python’s dotenv package. Both of these packages, and likely others, will intelligently load environment variables so as to not override existing system environment variables unless explicitly requested. This behavior allows you to still specific environment variables on a per-command basis when running commands in your shell.

Should I Switch To .env?

If you aren’t having any issues with environment variables, I wouldn’t recommend switching to .env just because it sounds neat. If however you have encountered some of the same challenges I mentioned in this article, you may want to experiment with .env as a way to augment or replace your usage of environment variables. Finally, remember that this article is merely my opinion on the subject and is by no means a comprehensive article about all the aspects of this subject. Regardless of if you decide to use any of the techniques I discussed in this article, I hope that it helped you learn a bit more about this particular area of software development. Cheers!