Jan 17, 2015
Environment Variables, the Ruby way
Use Nenv for clean access to the environment
Ruby is a beautiful language. Programs written in Ruby are expressive and easy to read.
So when it comes time to use environment variables in Ruby, it looks like the program is screaming at you with all caps. Add the fact that there everybody handles boolean environment variables differently — should you compare to ‘true’, ‘TRUE’, ‘yes’, ‘1' or all of them—and you will see that there is room for improvements.
A new gem called Nenv makes it all go away. It provides several Ruby-isms for dealing with environment variables.
It makes checking boolean environment variables expressive and beautiful.
It makes configuring packages from the environment pretty by adding the concept of namespaces to groups of variables that share the same prefix.
So go ahead, make your code beautiful and add Nenv to your Gemfile today!
