I'm sure most of you know and usedotenv files. They are great for storing app configs:everything that is likely to vary between deploys

MY_APP_KEY=supersecret

These app configs are stored in a convenient key/value pair in a dotenv file. But what may come as a surprise to you is thatevery value is a string

DAYS_UNTIL_DATA_DELETION=60AWS_DISABLE=true

Both are in factstrings. Later on, when you will want to check if AWS is disabled, you will have to write this code (which I have seen over and over again in many projects)

if(process.env.AWS_DISABLE==="true"){...}// what???

That is just silly! When faced with boolean values I always write them with yes/no instead of true/false.

Furthermore, I quote every value in the dotenv files to make sure that every developer that reads the file knows the values are strings.

Here is the result:

MY_APP_KEY="supersecret"DAYS_UNTIL_DATA_DELETION="60"AWS_DISABLE="yes"

Hope you enjoyed reading the article as much as I enjoyed writing it. And please do not store your boolean config values as strings. Give the yes/no option a try.

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