[Feature]: Support for Environment Variables in Request Files

[dinocodesx]

Describe the Feature You Are Requesting

Currently, Termino-Logistic requires users to hardcode API keys, authentication tokens, and other sensitive information directly within YAML/JSON request files. This approach has security risks and reduces flexibility when switching environments (development, staging, production).

💡 Proposed Feature:

• Allow users to reference environment variables inside request files using ${VARIABLE_NAME} syntax.
• Automatically replace placeholders with their corresponding values from the system environment.
• Provide an option to load variables from a .env file for projects that store configurations locally.

📝 Example Usage:
request.yml

url: https://api.example.com/data
method: GET
headers:
  Authorization: "Bearer ${API_KEY}"
params:
  user_id: "${USER_ID}"

Command Execution:

# Run request with environment variables automatically resolved
export API_KEY="my-secret-key"
export USER_ID="12345"
termino -f request.yml

Why Is This Feature Needed?

• Security Improvement: Prevents accidental exposure of sensitive credentials in version control.
• Environment Flexibility: Users can switch between different API keys or settings without modifying files.
• Ease of Use: Developers already use environment variables in other CLI tools (e.g., curl, Postman).

---

How to Implement

1️⃣ Modify the Request File Parser

• Update the request file processing logic to scan for placeholders (${VAR_NAME}).
• Extract corresponding values from system environment variables.
• If a variable is undefined, handle it gracefully (error message or fallback value).

2️⃣ Support for .env File Loading

• Check if a .env file exists in the project directory.
• Automatically load variables from .env into the environment for resolution.
• Ensure compatibility with common .env file formats used in Python projects.

3️⃣ Handling Missing or Undefined Variables

• Provide clear warnings when a required environment variable is missing.
• Optionally allow users to define default values in case an environment variable is not set.

4️⃣ Testing and Validation

• Write test cases to verify environment variable resolution.
• Ensure correct behavior when variables contain special characters or spaces.
• Validate how the tool behaves if .env is missing or incorrectly formatted.

---

Additional Context

• This feature aligns with best practices in secure API request handling.
• Future enhancement: Support nested environment variables (e.g., ${BASE_URL}/users).
• Works well with containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes) where secrets are stored in environment variables.

Would love to get community feedback on this! Feel free to contribute. 🚀

[kanak227]

i can work on this @debarshee2004