Why?

We needed a way of checking that environment variables were defined and improving the developer experience when they are not.

What?

envar is our solution to a very specific problem: the developer experience when a required environment variable is undefined.

How?

Installation

Install the package by adding envar to your list of dependencies in your mix.exs file:

def deps do
  [
    {:envar, "~> 1.0.1"}
  ]
end

Usage

In your code, when you need to retrieve an environment variable, use the following:

DATABASE_URL = Envar.get("DATABASE_URL")

Or if you need to check that a variable is set, use:

if Envar.is_set?("Heroku") do
  # do stuff on Heroku
end

For more detail, please see docs: https://hexdocs.pm/envar/api-reference.html

Context

We created this module after doing a search of the Elixir (Hex.pm) ecosystem,
see: dwyl/learn-environment-variables/issues/18

There are several modules available, we wanted something very basic/specific to our needs.
We don't expect anyone else to use this; it's Open Source because that's just what we do:
/manifesto.md#open-source-always