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And I don't get storing your configuration in env variables, period. They're not discoverable at all, there's no namespacing nor any other isolation, there's no structure to them, and if you want a list you'll have to come up with an ad-hoc encoding. Environment variables are a mess, you'd be better off with a config file.

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I assume environment variables became popular as it's an 'easy' way to inject secrets without hardcoding them in a config file.

Whether you like them or not, using env vars is ubiquitous because it's easy. Anything else ends up tightly coupled within your application code or only within the environment. Often you have a set of config needed both for your application and your surrounding dev tools / scripts. This tries a provide a universal solution.

At the end of the day you could imagine varlock loading your config, and injecting it using a method that is not env vars - a file, sidecar process, etc.

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