Your .env.example Is Lying to You, Here's How to Fix It (opens in new tab)

Last month I cloned a project, copied .env.example to .env, and ran npm run dev. The app crashed with a confusing database error. Turns out the example file was missing DATABASE_URL — someone had added it to the actual code months ago but forgot to update the example 🤔. I spent close to 45 minutes digging through source to find every env var the app needed. This isn't a one-off. It can happens in every project that maintains .env.example by hand. The problem .env.example is documentation, and...