dotenv-expand adds variable expansion on top of dotenv, letting you expand environment variables that already exist on your machine for use in a .env file. It provides an expand function, and can also be preloaded from the command line (node -r dotenv-expand/config) to apply expansion early in an app’s startup.
Project status
- Maintenance status: Active maintenance is strongly suggested, with a very recent upstream push on 2026-07-29 and a new tagged update v1000.0.0 on the same date.
- Update cadence: The project shows an “evolving but not daily” pattern, with updates in 2026-04-17 (v13.0.0) and 2026-07-29 (v1000.0.0), then earlier tags spaced further apart (for example 2025-09-02 (v12.0.3)).
AI summary generated
Recent updates
v1000.0.0
This release (v1000.0.0) ships major internal rewrites but provides no publisher release notes in the provided release_notes payload. The actual code changes add new capabilities for expansion, including command substitution evaluation and decryption of encrypted values, and also change how default/alternate expansions treat empty strings versus unset variables.
v13.0.0
v13.0.0 primarily updates the runtime dependency dotenv from the v16 series to the v17 series. The repo also updates CI to test against newer Node.js versions and removes the Codecov upload step. No application/library source code changes are shown in the provided diff, but the dependency upgrade is likely to affect runtime behavior.
v12.0.3
Release v12.0.3 primarily updates project metadata and documentation, including sponsor attribution in README.md and adds a dated entry in CHANGELOG.md. There are no apparent runtime or API code changes in the provided diff.
v12.0.2
Release v12.0.2 was published on 2025-04-17, but the publisher did not provide release notes. No developer-facing changes, fixes, or upgrade guidance are available from the provided release information.
v12.0.1
v12.0.1 makes a small but behavior-affecting change to dotenv-expand’s variable expansion loop. The provided release notes are empty, so developers must rely on the code diff and the changelog entry included in the repository.
v12.0.0
v12.0.0 rewrites the environment expansion logic in lib/main.js, including a new interpolation engine and different parsing and expansion semantics. The behavior around ${VAR:-default}, alternate expansions like ${VAR:+alt}, recursion order, and handling of pre-existing process.env values appears to have changed substantially.
v11.0.7
v11.0.7 makes a targeted change to the environment variable interpolation logic, specifically around self-referencing variables. The update also bumps the dotenv dependency to 16.4.5 and adjusts tests (and README examples) to match the new expansion behavior.
Breakingv11.0.6
This release is a small packaging-only update with a version bump to v11.0.6. The code diff shows no runtime logic changes, only changes to what gets included in the npm package and the corresponding version metadata.
v11.0.5
v11.0.5 makes a targeted fix for recursive environment variable expansion, specifically for cases where a nested expansion key is sourced from values already present in process.env. It also bumps the dotenv dependency and updates tests to cover the recursive and process.env interaction scenarios.
v11.0.4
v11.0.4 contains a small fix to dotenv-expand's interpolation logic to prevent problematic recursive expansion cases. The GitHub release notes field was empty, so the changes in the published package are not described there.
v11.0.3
Release v11.0.3 was published on 2024-02-11, but no release notes or change details were provided by the publisher. As a result, the developer impact (new features, fixes, breaking changes) cannot be determined from the release notes alone.