chalk VS dotenv

4. Chalk

Chalk: Provides an easy way to stylize terminal strings with various colors and text formatting in Node.js, aiding in creating visually appealing command-line outputs

Chalk is a popular choice for adding colors to CLI output while maintaining readability.

Librerías: Chalk winston, log4js

Today the most popular library and de facto standard is the chаlk. The chalk has rich functionality, is fast but not ideal. It lacks some useful features.

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

One of the libraries I used most that went full-ESM is Chalk. They released v5 over a year-and-a-half ago (November 2021) with ESM-only support and haven't updated v4 - their last iteration that supported CommonJS - since. If you go into their GitHub Issues section, you'll see a number of issues raised about CommonJS support, most of which are just responded to with a link to a post they made about switching over. Fair enough. I guess if I had to constantly answer the same question over and over, I might do the same.

To colorize my logs, I used a chalk package and created a logger utility:

We will add some dependencies to help us deal with CLI behaviours (inquirer) and text coloring (chalk).

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.