Skip process.exit(1) in Browser mode

[af]

Skip process.exit(1) in Browser mode

[SimenB]

Is it not enough to just provide a custom reporter? https://github.com/af/envalid/blob/ad2f612ddef8b4a07d6b6d553f33aad21cbfb849/README.md#error-reporting

We could consider just throwing as well. Default behavior would then for node to print and exit with status 1, which is essentially what we do already

[af]

Yeah, browser usage was never really intended for this library initially, which is why node apis like process.exit() are used in various places. I'm thinking we could add a new option like onExit, which would allow the consuming code to override this default exit behavior. Would that work for your case?

[Kim-Andersen]

Yeah, browser usage was never really intended for this library initially, which is why node apis like process.exit() are used in various places. I'm thinking we could add a new option like onExit, which would allow the consuming code to override this default exit behavior. Would that work for your case?

Yes, onExit would do the job.

[af]

Ah! Thank you @SimenB, I forgot process.exit() is only used in the reporter. That's definitely the
way to go here, so closing this out.

[kachkaev]

It'd be useful to split a defaultReporter function into two: one would dump errors into an output string and another one will run console.error and process.exit.

I’ve got at least two projects where I'd be interested in importing the dump function. In those, I prefer throwing instead of exiting inside the reporter, because having a valid env is an optional thing.

@af will you be happy to accept a PR that extracts dumpErrors from defaultReporter and exports the new function as envalid.dumpErrors? Happy to work on it. I know I can just copy-paste the code and format errors as I want, but I like you that's done in the libarary, so keen to keep my apps' output style in sync with the original.

---

Here is my workaround for now:

const defaultReporter = require("envalid/src/reporter");

const customReporter = (opts) => {
  const originalConsoleError = console.error;
  const originalProcessExit = process.exit;

  let errorOutput = "";
  console.error = (output) => {
    errorOutput += output;
  };
  process.exit = () => {};

  defaultReporter(opts);

  process.exit = originalProcessExit;
  console.error = originalConsoleError;

  if (errorOutput) {
    throw new Error("Environment variables are not valid\n\n" + errorOutput);
  }
};

Instead, I'd like to write:

const { dumpErrors } = require "envalid";

const customReporter = (opts) => {
  const output = dumpErrors(opts)
  if (output) {
    throw new Error("Environment variables are not valid\n\n" + output);
  }
};