I could see us eventually wanting something like @toolness did with https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges/blob/development/bin/db-migrate (I believe this is what you were referring to briefly in our call this morning), just so that we could define these variables in the config.json file or with command line options as well (using config-store).  This isn't super-critical, certainly, and it won't be particularly relevant to a production environment, since we'll just be using environment variables there anyway, but it might be nice for development purposes to be able to put everything in config.json.

Anyway, I don't see a reason to hold this PR up for something like that, it's just an idea for the future perhaps.