npm-config

Use npm for configuration.

Motivation

The location of configuration settings gets scattered on projects of any size.

Keeping track of different values between development, staging, production, et. al. environment is a pain. Which files should be .gitignored? Is YAML still cool? Or only JSON? How about XML?

npm provides some nice answers for us out of the box. Let's use that instead!

Usage

IMPORTANT: npm config settings are available to node applications only when run as npm run <command>. These commands are found in package.json inside the scripts object.

First, add some configuration settings to package.json:

...
{
  "config":
    "development": { "color": "red" },
    "staging": { "color": "blue" },
    "production": { "color": "green" }
}
...

Write a script that reads these settings:

// colors.js
var env = process.env.NODE_ENV || 'development'
  , config = require('npm-config')
  , color = config(env, color) // red
;

Add the script to package.json:

...
{
  "scripts": { "colors": "node colors.js" }
}
...

And run it:

$ npm run colors

How about those pesky .gitignore files? Let npms config handle that, too:

$ npm set development:database:password my_secret_password

{
  "scripts": { 
    "colors": "node colors.js",
    "example": "node -p "console.log(require(\"npm-config\")(\"development\", \"database\",\"password\"));"
  }
}

$ npm run example