Quick Start

Get up and running with EnvGuard in under 5 minutes.

1. Install EnvGuard

# macOS / Linux
curl -sSL https://github.com/firasmosbehi/envguard/releases/latest/download/envguard-$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')-$(uname -m | sed 's/x86_64/amd64/') -o /usr/local/bin/envguard
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/envguard

Verify the installation:

envguard version

2. Create a Schema

Create envguard.yaml in your project root:

version: "1.0"

env:
  DATABASE_URL:
    type: string
    required: true
    description: "PostgreSQL connection string"
    format: url

  PORT:
    type: integer
    min: 1024
    max: 65535
    default: 3000
    description: "HTTP server port"

  DEBUG:
    type: boolean
    default: false
    description: "Enable debug mode"

  ALLOWED_HOSTS:
    type: array
    separator: ","
    default: "localhost,127.0.0.1"
    description: "Comma-separated list of allowed hosts"

3. Validate Your .env

Create .env:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost:5432/myapp
PORT=3000
DEBUG=true
ALLOWED_HOSTS=localhost,example.com

Run validation:

$ envguard validate
✓ All environment variables are valid

4. See It Fail

Introduce an error in .env:

PORT=not-a-number

Run validation again:

$ envguard validate
✗ PORT: expected integer, got "not-a-number"

5. Generate a Starter Schema

If you already have a .env file, infer a schema from it:

envguard init --infer

Or start from scratch:

envguard init

This creates envguard.yaml with types and formats auto-detected from your existing values.

Next Steps

• Learn about all validation rules
• Set up CI/CD integration
• Configure watch mode for live validation