# Envful
Envful is a CLI tool that verifies the presence of environment variables. It looks inside your [.env](https://www.npmjs.com/package/dotenv) file and system environment.
## Installation
### NPM
You can install Envful using NPM, allowing you to run it from your project's scripts.
```bash
npm install envful
```
### crates.io
You can also install directly from crates.io using cargo.
```bash
cargo install envful
```
## Usage
Envful uses the `.env.example` file as a manifest for which variables are needed. If your project has a `.env.example` it already supports envful 🚀.
Check for variables and undeclared variables using `check`:
```bash
envful check
```
You can also specify a command to run if check is successful using the '--' separator. It will immediately fail if a variable is missing, showing helpful messages.
```bash
envful -- echo "I am envful!"
envful -- npm run dev
```
```
USAGE:
envful [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>
OPTIONS:
-d, --dir <DIR> Directory to look for .env and .env.example files
-h, --help Print help information
-V, --version Print version information
SUBCOMMANDS:
check Check if the .env has all required variables and warns if missing
help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
```
## How to declare variables
Inside your `.env.example` file, you can declare the variables that your application requires. You can use the triple # to add a comment to the variable.
Example:
```bash
### The URL to the database instance [required]
DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/postgres
### The app secret used to sign JSON Web Tokens
APP_SECRET=
```