Never use environment variables for configuration

• ninja

  51 10,506 7.9 C++

  a small build system with a focus on speed

  

there's an astonishingly silly GitHub issue thread linked in the comments of the post: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/issues/1482

• prometheus

  381 52,748 9.9 Go

  The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

  

Any link about that? Are you talking about this? https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/6047#issueco...

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• viper

  74 25,756 8.8 Go

  Go configuration with fangs

> Perhaps the ideal tool would allow every option to be set/changed from config file, environment and argument.

This is exactly what the most widely used golang configuration library does: https://github.com/spf13/viper

• figga

  1 1 1.8 Python

  A simple configuration manager for Python

The most common problem that I've encountered with using environment variables for configuration is that developers often add them ad-hoc, in the module where the configuration is needed, making it impossible to have a clear idea of all the configurable options in a program.

The solution is not to get rid of env vars, but to have a mechanism that centralises the confirguration in one place; this way all the options are easy to locate, and they can be defined in multiple ways.

Shameless plug, FWIW: figga is my humble contribution to this area for Python: https://github.com/berislavlopac/figga

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