Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

This is a CLI Docs Problem, not another kind of Docs Problem.

• This is a CLI Docs Problem.

Description of Problem

This is about the ambiguity regarding the case of the environment variables.

If we take NPM_CONFIG_USERCONFIG as the example.
Here in the docs, it's referred as NPM_CONFIG_USERCONFIG, in uppercase:

per-user configuration file (defaults to $HOME/.npmrc; configurable via CLI
option --userconfig or environment variable $NPM_CONFIG_USERCONFIG)

However later in the same docs, and in the source, it's referred as npm_config_userconfig, in lowercase:

This may be overridden by the npm_config_userconfig environment variable
or the --userconfig command line option

I understand that both uppercase NPM_CONFIG_USERCONFIG and lowercase npm_config_userconfig work, because internally the environment variable names are converted to lowercase.

But what happens if both NPM_CONFIG_USERCONFIG and npm_config_userconfig are set? Or even if there's alsoNPM_CONFIG_userconfig? I haven't done a thorough testing but I bet the result would be interesting and/or surprising.

Can we follow the convention and always refer to environment variable names in uppercase? That is already the de-facto standard. Thank you!

Potential Solution

Always use environment variables in uppercase.

Affected URL

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/using-npm/config#userconfig