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 — nes