mkleene / environ

Library for managing environment variables in Clojure

Environ

Environ is a Clojure library for managing environment settings from a number of different sources. It works well for applications following the 12 Factor App pattern.

Currently, Environ supports three sources, resolved in the following order:

1. A .lein-env file in the project directory
2. Environment variables
3. Java system properties

The first source is set via the "lein-environ" Leiningen plugin, which dumps the contents of the :env key in the project map into that file.

Installation

Include the following dependency in your project.clj file:

:dependencies [[environ "1.0.0"]]

If you want to be able to draw settings from the Leiningen project map, you'll also need the following plugin:

:plugins [[lein-environ "1.0.0"]]

Example Usage

Let's say you have an application that requires a database connection. Often you'll need three different databases, one for development, one for testing, and one for production.

Lets pull the database connection details from the key :database-url on the environ.core/env map.

(require '[environ.core :refer [env]])

(def database-url
  (env :database-url))

The value of this key can be set in several different ways. The most common way during development is to use a local profiles.clj file in your project directory. This file contained a map that is merged with the standard project.clj file, but can be kept out of version control and reserved for local development options.

{:dev  {:env {:database-url "jdbc:postgres://localhost/dev"}}
 :test {:env {:database-url "jdbc:postgres://localhost/test"}}}

In this case we add a database URL for the dev and test environments. This means that if you run lein repl, the dev database will be used, and if you run lein test, the test database will be used.

When you deploy to a production environment, you can make use of environment variables, like so:

DATABASE_URL=jdbc:postgres://localhost/prod java -jar standalone.jar

Or use Java system properties:

java -Ddatabase.url=jdbc:postgres://localhost/prod -jar standalone.jar

Note that Environ automatically lowercases keys, and replaces the characters "_" and "." with "-". The environment variable DATABASE_URL and the system property database.url are therefore both converted to the same keyword :database-url.

License

Copyright © 2014 James Reeves

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.