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As someone who loves coding pet projects but is not a software engineer by profession, I find the paradigm of maintaining all these config files and environment variables exhausting, and there seem to be more and more of them for any non-trivial projects.
Not only do I find it hard to remember which is which or to locate any specific setting, their mechanisms often feel mysterious too: I often have to manually test them to see if they actually work or how exactly. This is not the case for actual code, where I can understand the logic just by reading it, since it has a clearer flow.
And I just can’t make myself blindly copy other people's config/env files without knowing what each switch is doing. This makes building projects, and especially copying or imitating other people's projects, a frustrating experience.
How do you deal with this better, my fellow professionals?
Replies
First of all, I read the documentation for the tools I'm trying to configure.
I know this is very 20th century, but it helps a lot to understand how everything fits together and to remember what each tool does in a complex stack.
Documentation is not always perfect or complete, but it makes it much easier to find parameters in config files and know which ones to tweak.
And when the documentation falls short, the old adage applies: "Use the source, Luke."
Honestly... ask an AI agent to update them for you.
They do an excellent job of reading documentation and searching to pick and choose and filter config that you might care about.
After decades of maintaining them myself, this was a huge breath of fresh air for me.
> As someone who loves coding pet projects but is not a software engineer by profession, I find the paradigm of maintaining all these config files and environment variables exhausting
Then don’t.
> How do you deal with this better, my fellow professionals?
By not doing it.
Look, it’s your project. Why are you frustrating yourself? What you do is you set up your environment, your configuration, what you need/understand/prefer and that’s it. You’ll find out what those are as you go along. If you need, document each line as you add it. Don’t complicate it.
Simplify your tools and build processes to as few as possible, and pick tools with fewer (or no) config files.
It could depend on what you're doing, but if it's not for work the config hell is probably optional.
You start with the cleanest most minimal config you can get away with, but over the years you keep adding small additions and tweaks until it becomes a massive behemoth that only you will ever understand the reasoning behind.
Don't fall for the "JS ecosystem" trap and use sane tools. If a floobergloob requires you to add a floobergloob.config.js to your project root that's a very good indicator floobergloob is not worth your time.
The only boilerplate files you need in a JS repo root are gitignore, package.json, package-lock.json and optionally tsconfig if you're using TS.
A node.js project shouldn't require a build step, and most websites can get away with a single build.js that calls your bundler (esbuild) and copies some static files dist/.
Software folks love over-engineering things. If you look at the web coding craze of a few years ago, people started piling up tooling on top of tooling (frameworks, build pipelines, linting, generators etc.) for something that could also be zero-config, and just a handful of files for simple projects.
I guess this happens when you're too deep in a topic and forget that eventually the overhead of maintaining the tooling outweights the benefits. It's a curse of our profession. We build and automate things, so we naturally want to build and automate tooling for doing the things we do.