Proposal for environment extension to package.json

package.js

// Problem: there are a class of packages on npm that are best described as "services", e.g., statsd, thumbd.
//          there is not a straight-forward, machine-readable, way to setup the necessary dependencies for these services.
//
// Solution: the various parties that are building tools for deploying these services (Heroku, Node OS, ndm) should agree
//           on a standard for programatically describing environment dependencies in the package.json.
//
// What Jacob and I came up with:
{
  "name": "statsd",
  "dependencies": {
    "request": "^1.0.0"
  },
  "environment": {
    "PORT": "8125", // Default value of 8125 for PORT, user could still choose to override.
    "GRAPHITE_HOST": { // Rather than simply a default value, environment can provide meta information.
      "default": "http://localhost:2004", // default value.
      "description": "Full URL of host that StatsD should feed its metrics to", // human readable description.
      "url": "https://www.hostedgraphite.com/" // URL of hosted solution, perhaps a Heroku AddOn?
    }
  }
}