Inquirer.js VS dotenv

Inquirer.js is a handy tool for adding interactive prompts to your CLI.

There is a CLI application based on Inquirer. Potentially, it could be another CLI library, say something from the following list. Our goal is to provide integration tests. But before that, let's look at the related terminology.

inquirer

If you boil plop down to its core, it is basically glue code between inquirer prompts and handlebar templates.

This is a new tutorial on how to create a command line interface application, and our application today is a Mortgage Calculator. I used in this program packages such as 1- inquirer for interactive questions and answers: https://www.npmjs.com/package/inquirer 2- Sqlite3 DBMS 3- Chalk for colorful output in the terminal: https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk

We can easily achieve that with the inquirer package. This package allows you to ask different types of questions, such as input questions (open-text questions), confirmation questions (Yes/No), etc.

We will put our Emailjs environment variables in a dotenv (.env) file. To read more about the purpose of this file click here.

Add .env to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being committed. Here's an example file with it already added. You may also use dotenv for advanced configuration and it will automatically load environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

dotenv: Designed to load environment variables from a .env file into the process.env environment

Like Doppler, Infisical uses environment variable injection. Similar to the Dotenv package for Node, when used in Node, it injects them at run time into the process object of the running app so they're not readable by any other processes or users. They can still be revealed by a crash dump or logging, so that is a caveat to consider in your code and build scripts.

We'll be working with databases' ids and different info that should be secured so I would advise you to create a .env file to store said info. We'll do this by installing dotenv into our project and use it accordingly:

dotenv - For reading our API keys from the environment

As an avid dotenv user I wanted to thank their maintainers for keeping the project alive for 10 years (wow). A perfect exemplary of dedication to Open Source.

Sensitive data like database URLs, API keys, and passwords should never be hardcoded in your application code. Instead, use environment variables accessed at runtime to keep this information secret. Popular dotenv libraries like dotenv make this easy for Node.js apps.