I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
What I find more frustrating is undocumented environment variables to override config locations.
The amount of times I’ve had to dig through the source code for a CLI to find an environment variable to force the config somewhere should be zero. But it’s not.
This drives me freaking bonkers. A lot of times libraries tend not to expose the env var to discourage its usage but IF YOU MADE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU HAD A USE CASE FOR IT.
I genuinely do not like apps using environment variables for config if they aren’t running in their own contained environment. It makes me uncomfortable.