Hacker News Reader

Comment by flakes | Hacker News Reader

> Sharing environment variables is an ad hoc manual process at my current company (and was the same way in previous workplaces as well).

It really shouldn’t be that way. If the data is meant to be selectively accessed, it should have access controls in place with Authentication, Authorization and Auditing. If its any employees discretion to share the data with another adhoc, I certainly hope the secret is not of great value.

View on HN

Oh we share secrets using a password manager. But it's a long laundry list of secrets that you have to manually load into your system somehow. There's also an env file there somewhere but it's not up to date.

Eliminating the cognitive load of looking up the relevant secret, writing it manually into the RC file, testing whether it works (and starting over if it doesn't, because it's possible the secret is outdated) was one of the goals of creating this.

Sounds to me like a configuration-driven interface with the password manager is the appropriate solution here, then. I used this pattern to write config files out of secrets stored in SSM, which previously was ad-hoc secret sharing. FWIW I would never use Sendenv.

That is one solution yes, if you already have a password manager which gives APIs to work with it's secrets. Or a separate product like Doppler which is specialized for this use case. My idea was to avoid a central store, and honestly I don't intend to compete with these massive companies with my weekend long project. If a few people find it useful, I'm happy with it. Thanks for your feedback!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com