In my experience, if you prevent using envs for secrets (as docker swarm does) all you get is a disgruntled programmer reading the contents of a secret file to an env in the entrypoint.
1. They're stored right next to variables like PATH, JAVA_HOME, LC_ALL and PYTHONPATH which people might plausibly decide to log out every time
2. They'll get printed any time someone writes a shell script with set -x then uses the environment variable.
3. They'll probably end up in your developers' ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc, meaning any program logging the environment will log it, not just your program
4. Because they'll be in ~/.profile or similar, the secret will be in a file on disk anyway and a secret that's in one place is always better than a secret that's in two places.
With that said, a lot of CI servers that support "secure variables" offer those as environment variables and nothing else. So I can understand why people might end up stuck with environment variables despite their downsides.
Also, application secrets for development environments probably shouldn't be super sensitive in the first place, right? For example, for a third party API key for a service like Auth0, we would have a dev tenant within Auth0 so even if a developer's environment is compromised, it can't jeopardize production.
I tend to stick to files, it's just more convenient and reusable. But if you're on a single user system don't worry about passing things via the command line or via envvars.
No, they aren't. You just create a .env file in your project root and run "source .env" before you run your application.
Unlike Windows there are no global environment variables on Linux. All of them are hierarchical and only exist within the process they were created and its children.
So what? If the problem is that people might accidentally log secrets then the problem is not env variables.
> 2. They'll get printed any time someone writes a shell script
The set -x flag is a debugging flag to print out traces of a shell script being executed. This flag is disabled by default. Why is this far-fetched example being used to justify not using env variables?
> 3. They'll probably end up in your developers' ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc,
No, they don't. With containers you may launch devel env variables some way or another (env files, setting up the IDE, setting env variables manually) but at most they are a part of a testing config. The env variables used in production are handled by the deployment.
Even if you're able to sniff a env variable used in development, that has nothing to do with the production service.
> 4. Because they'll be in ~/.profile or similar, the secret will be in a file on disk anyway
This complaint makes no sense at all. No container orchestration system stores env variables in ~/.profile although their containers use env variables For secrets extensively. The container orchestration service provides secret-management services, including setting up the env your containers are launched, and all you need to care about is that your container needs to accept certain env variables that you will use on your app.
Even if you deploy services on bare metal, you should still use env variables for config and secrets, but you need to be able to manage secrets and rotate keys with a non-pet method.
> So I can understand why people might end up stuck with environment variables despite their downsides.
I'm sorry but you failed to both present any downside of using secrets and point out any scenario from the real world. I mean, anyone who ever read any intro tutorial on how to deploy a system is well-aware that you should not store passwords and keys and secrets in plain-text files. That has nothing to do with using env variables at all. In fact, all your examples are entirely oblivious to the standard workflow of deploying a service, moreso if it involves a container orchestration system.
So if the examples don't have any relation with basic practices and real-world workflows, why should anyone avoid using a best-practice?
The issue isn’t that it can’t be done but more that most people either don’t already know it can be done or don’t want to invest in the infrastructure to do it.
Regarding the latter point, for self hosted solutions I can sympathise a little and it’s really a question of risk analysis. But most cloud computing services do offer their own secrets management service.
(not affiliated with Hashicorp and other services exist).
The values might not be in the immediate container space (well, aside from being in program memory), but they're only one (likely well documented internally to the container) hop away.
True but those credentials can be decoupled from the application (like env vars are) so you satisfy the developer problem I was addressing.