Fnox, a secret manager that pairs well with mise | Hacker News Reader

Fnox, a secret manager that pairs well with mise

github.com

185 pointsbpierre43 comments

Love the thought put into mise and now fnox. They’re a joy to use.

Agree on mise. It's a great tool, really well implemented and easy to use. I've been trying to set up hk[0] this week and it's unfortunately not been as smooth a ride though.

[0] https://hk.jdx.dev/

that's fair. The DX of hk is a much harder problem since it will always require a decent amount of customization to fit into a project. I will be improving this though.

I'd probably say hk is the most challenging pre-commit manager to setup compared to its peers. That said, it's also the only one that can run hooks in parallel safely and deal with partially staged files where the others don't bother with these problems.

At least right now hk is good for folks that want the fastest and don't mind a bit of effort. Hopefully I can improve that and make it the best all-around.

Im very open to a bit of a learning curve! I wasn’t able to get a pre commit of ‘tofu fmt -check’ with the list of tf files changed working, which was frustrating! I found working with pkl tough as there’s little/no editor support (compared to writing tasks in toml with mise). I tried adding a post install hook to mise to run hk install which had surprising side effects!

I’m looking forward to trying fnox!

I added this for the next hk release: https://github.com/jdx/hk/commit/0fe8610fbe5d9f1c6977e0be596...

In the spirit of things I sent a PR in for the other footgun that I noticed. https://github.com/jdx/hk/pull/382

I suspect it may have been that it was using `*.tf` instead of `**/*.tf`

Mind if I ask what trouble you've had setting up hk? I've been using it a while now and I love it almost as much as I love mise. Took me a little while to get my head around pkl (and if I'm honest, I'm very much still winging it) but otherwise it's been a joy to use.

No support for opentofu, so I had to write a custom hook for tofu instead of terraform. Then the hook itself didn’t work because tofu fmt didn’t like the full list of files being passed on instead of just the tf files. Then I had an issue with tflint. It wasn’t clear that hk would install in the current directory and not the git repo. Writing pkl was awkward - vscode has no support.

That’s just off the top of my head.

Thanks, that's a list of things I've never needed from it which explains our different experiences!

Our use case is a dotnet project with infra defined in terraform. Dotnet fmt is too slow to run as a pre commit hook so I wanted to try tflint and tofu fmt as I know they are very quick and they are relatively easy to work with.

They both accept a list of files to work on, but the filter on hk gives you a full list of files that changed, so if a cs file and a tf file changes, both steps will fire with both the cs and the tf file

I think a small improvement might be adding a matched_files template sub that would only show the files that matched the glob rule. I also think an LSP integration for VSCode would go a long way. I could manage the first but the second might be pushing my limits

there is one: https://github.com/apple/pkl-lsp it works great for me

Thanks! I didn’t think of searching outside the store. Works great so far.

Yeah, I found the import of existing pre-commit config wasn't very useful. I just switched to using prek as a much faster drop-in replacement for pre-commit https://github.com/j178/prek. Really like mise though, and just started using fnox yesterday.

I was about to implement it into a pilot project, but then ran into this while reading the docs:

# New person joins the team:

# 7. Team lead updates fnox.toml with new recipient

# Then re-encrypts all secrets:

fnox set DATABASE_URL "$(fnox get DATABASE_URL)" --provider age # ... repeat for all secrets

It's a bit surprising you have to manually do this, I'd imagine fnox already has knowledge of all the secrets and could do this automatically.

From the initial feature set it sounds like Mozilla SOPS.

I was gonna say the same. Not that there is anything bad in having alternatives, but if you like fnox, you might want to have a look at SOPS as well.

Mise already supported sops and age (https://mise.jdx.dev/environments/secrets/), so I'm assuming there's something more to it. (Existing or planned.)

There's no explanation or link to mise from that page that I can see. I now know what mise is, but that's from googling

It's a dev tool manager

The link in the post is literally on the Mise Github page. One click and you're on the main page reading the detailed README.

github.com is a popular website that lets you publish your git (a version control system) -based projects for others to read and contribute to.

In this case, the user “jdx” has published an issue (a bug or feature development tracker) about a complimentary project, but you can still access the source code and documentation about “mise” by clicking on the hyperlink labelled “mise” at the top of the page.

lmao wut?

Any alternatives to mise with less bloat? I don’t want the direnv and tasks functionality

Just...don't use them?

I've use mise happily for many months without using direnv or tasks, and everything I use it for works and is solid. Installs python, ruby, node, does the switching, does the shims, stays out of the way.

direnv and tasks and everything else mise can do is all opt-in.

asdf is a predecessor to mise, and focuses language version management only.

https://asdf-vm.com

what bloat?

If you need to manage your dev secrets, it seems like you've fucked up? It's 2025, any secrets should be generated on or provisioned on a single machine. If you're copying them or storing them, then https://xkcd.com/463/

Yes, because in 2025 every business is FAANG scale and has a dedicated SRE team and a SecOps team to manage all the secrets foo. (/s, obviously)

Different people have different experiences and work on things in a very diverse scale. The existence of one thing does not obviate all other things.

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