I Audited 5 Popular awesome-nodejs Packages for Their Environment Variable Documentation. Here's the Scorecard.

awesome-nodejs is the canonical curated list of quality Node.js packages. Quality implies documentation. I wanted to see how these packages handle .env documentation specifically — the section most developers rely on when setting up a new service in a fresh environment. Methodology I picked 5 packages from across the awesome-nodejs categories: a web framework, an ORM, an auth library, a logger, and a test runner. For each, I inspected the README, searched for process.env usage across the codebase using the GitHub search API, checked for a .env.example file, and looked at any dedicated docs pages. Scoring criteria (0–3 each, 9 max): Completeness: are all env vars the package reads actually documented? Clarity: does the documentation explain what each variable does, what values are valid, and what the default is? Freshness: does the documentation match what's in the current code? express — expressjs/express GitHub: expressjs/express Express reads exactly one env var in its core: NODE_ENV