In #796 I mentioned wanting some of the utils factored out for code cleanliness and standalone use.

In particular I cited a solution I implemented that made a peculiar use of util.loadConfigs() that I used to support a more robust module defaults.

But there’s another more obvious use and that’s providing validation of the entire config directory. Without forced reloading of node-config which IMO is gross.

I am proposing a version of loadConfigs that uses no ENV variables and does not modify the internal state like the sources, instead it returns a map that contains all of these modifications, and Config.util.loadConfigs() can call it and then apply the state changes to itself.

The idea here would be to provide a CLI for node-config that provides a list of NODE_CONFIG_ENV values and can check all files for well-formedness.

This might be a starting point for evacuating the other incidental util functions that don’t actually utilize the Config object or don’t really need to.