Carmine DiMascio

Thanks for the suggestion, Christophe. I agree. I've modified the template to utilize functional boundaries. As for injecting the configuration, I've opted not to to that. Injection enables the implementation to be overriden e.g. in tests. Given, the purpose of dotenv is to manage environment configuration e.g. test env, its better to not provide that option.

You could just set environment variables.

That is essentially the point. The twelve factor config tenet recommends just that. dotenv helps with ergonomics. The FAQ section on Node's dotenv page addresses some of your questions around usage.

Dotenv was initially created by the Ruby community to comply with the twelve factor configuration tenet . The idea behind it is to manage application configuration with environment variables, thus helping to ensure apps are easily portable from environemnt to environment.

Dotenv has already been ported to numerous languages, thus making it possible to apply these same methods to all such applications. If you buy into this idea, dotenv is for you.If you don't, then yes there a many, many alternative configuration options available.