ENV converter

Where ENV comes from

The convention came from Heroku's twelve-factor app methodology, published in 2011, which argued that configuration belongs in the environment rather than in code. Brandon Keepers' dotenv gem, and the Node package of the same name, turned that argument into a file everybody now recognises. There is no standard — every loader differs slightly over quoting, interpolation and export prefixes — which is exactly why a converter has to be conservative about what it will interpret.

How ENV works

• One assignment per line; keys are conventionally uppercase with underscores, and a leading export is tolerated by most loaders.
• Values may be quoted, and quoting is what allows a value to contain spaces, # characters or the delimiter itself.
• Some loaders expand $VARIABLE references inside values and some do not — the single largest source of dotenv surprises.
• There are no types: 8080 and true are strings until the application casts them.
• Comments start with #, and an empty value after = is legal and means an empty string.

When to use ENV

• Local development configuration kept out of version control
• Docker and container environment files
• Flattening structured configuration into variables a twelve-factor app can consume
• Auditing what configuration a project expects by converting it to JSON

Compatibility

Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, Go, Docker Compose, Kubernetes and every major framework read dotenv files. Novus Convert reads them locally through a bounded scalar model — no interpolation, no execution — and converts to JSON, TOML and INI. Conversion runs entirely in the browser, which is the only responsible way to handle a file that so often contains credentials.

Comments are read but not carried into the targets; JSON and INI have no comment channel, and TOML's is not populated.