Env House — User Guide

This short guide shows how to use the Env House extension from a user's perspective. It assumes you have the extension installed and activated in Visual Studio Code.

What Env House does

.Env Warehouse is a powerful Visual Studio Code extension designed to help you manage your .env variables in a structured and efficient way. Instead of repeatedly recreating environment variables across projects, you can store, organize, and reuse them from a centralized workspace sidebar.

All variables are securely persisted within the extension, meaning they remain available even after closing VSCode or switching between projects. This gives you a consistent, organized overview of your frequently used environment variables and enables fast, error-free implementation in any project.

The extension also supports named environment sets (such as local, staging, and prod), allowing you to maintain separate key–value configurations for different deployment stages. With a single action, you can import selected variables directly into a .env file or export entire sets when needed, making environment management clean, scalable, and developer-friendly.

Where to find it

• Open the Explorer side bar in VS Code.
• Find the Env Warehouse tree view (a custom provider). It lists environment sets as top-level nodes.

Buttons & Actions (UI reference)

Below are the actions and buttons you'll see in the Env House view and what each one does.

Where to click / how to trigger:

• Use the Env Warehouse tree in the Explorer sidebar and right-click sets or variables for the context menu.
• Or run the corresponding command from the Command Palette.

Recommended workflow (typical user flow):

1. Create a set with Create a folder named for your environment.
2. Select the folder and use Add Variable to add required key/value pairs.
3. During development either:
   • Place the editor cursor and use Insert Value to paste directly into the file.
4. Update values with Edit Variable when things change.
5. Remove unused variables or sets with Remove Variable or Delete Environment Set.

Safety notes and UX tips:

• If Delete Environment Set is destructive, expect a confirmation prompt.

Using values in tasks or debug configurations

Env House does not currently inject values automatically into tasks.json or launch.json. To use values there:

1. Copy the variable value with Copy Value.
2. Open tasks.json or launch.json and paste the value into the appropriate field.

Tip: You can maintain templates in your workspace and paste values when configuring tasks or launch configurations.

Practical examples

• Insert API keys or endpoints into configuration files while developing.
• Keep different sets for branches or services (e.g., backend-local, frontend-local).
• Use Search Variable,Search the variable, press enter, Copy Value to paste secret tokens into temporary terminal sessions (be cautious: clipboard can be read by other apps).
• Stores .env variables for easy use on different projects.
• Creating an overview of .env variables.

Safety & best practices

• Do not store highly sensitive secrets (production private keys, permanent tokens) unless you are certain your machine's storage is secure.
• Regularly review and remove secrets you no longer use.

Troubleshooting (user-level)

• I don't see the Env House view: run any Env Warehouse command from the Command Palette to activate the extension.
• Copy/insert not working: ensure the extension is active and reload the window (Developer: Reload Window).
• Values not persisted after restart: check that VS Code is not preventing extensions from saving global state, or check the Developer Tools console for errors.

Short reference of buttons

• Add Folder — creates a folder where variables can be stored.
• Add Variable — add a key/value to a set.
• Edit Variable — change key or value.
• Search Variable — searches for variables based of names, description and category/tag.
• Remove Variable — delete a variable.
• Delete Folder — deletes folder.
• Inject to .env — insert value into active editor.
• Import .env File — import an .env file into the extension.
• Import .env File to Folder — imports all existing variables inside the .env file into the extension. When the button is pressed in the folder selection, the variables are stored inside of the group.
• Export All to .env and Inject Folder to .env exports the variables in the existing .env file, when no file is within the project, a .env file will be created with the variables you wanted to export.

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