The env drift that kept breaking deploys
A small CLI for a problem everyone tolerated: git-ignored env files silently going out of sync.
The problem
Across ten development environments on concurrent projects, env files are git-ignored by design, so they drift. A variable added weeks ago in one project is simply missing in another, and nothing tells you until something breaks.
What I did
- Built env-diff, a Node.js CLI that compares your current env file against a reference file and prints exactly what is missing or different.
- Shipped prebuilt executables per OS so using it never required a toolchain — the tool had to be less friction than the problem.
Drift became a one-command check instead of an outage postmortem. Open-sourced, because every team with more than one environment has this exact problem.
The outcome
Read more
I wrote this one up in full: Easily Find Missing and Different Environment Variable Values.
