I Scanned 6 Popular Node.js Repos for Undocumented Environment Variables. Here's What I Found.

Most Node.js projects accumulate process.env references over time. Some document them in .env.example. Many don't. I wanted to know how bad the problem actually is in well-maintained, popular open-source repos — so I ran a search using the GitHub API. Here's what I found. The Repos I picked six repos with different scopes: two minimal HTTP frameworks, one structured framework, two full-stack application platforms, and one backend-as-a-service: Repo Stars Type expressjs/express ~65k HTTP framework fastify/fastify ~32k HTTP framework nestjs/nest ~68k Application framework strapi/strapi ~63k Headless CMS keystonejs/keystone ~9k Full-stack CMS supabase/supabase ~73k BaaS platform (monorepo) For each repo I used the GitHub code search API to count process.env references, then checked for the presence of .env.example (or .env.sample, .env.template) files at the root and recursively. Results Repo process.env refs .env.example files Coverage expressjs/express 6 0 — fastify/fastify 5 0 — nestjs