Show HN: Envelope – A modern environment variable cli tool

A word of caution - this is a way to leak your secrets through your shell history:

  $ envelope add dev db_pwd pwd

There are settings such that a command that starts with a space will not be saved in the history which would help here but I would be very careful about how you use this.

Interesting!

Have you looked at mise-en-place at all? It's written in rust too, and might have some cool ideas to use: https://mise.jdx.dev/

I like it.

Env variables should be a solved problem but no one has made the simplest general solution yet. Seems like you are on track.

One suggestion: no need to use SQLite. Just develop a simple (and _lasting_), plain text DSL and save to a file.

Here's one I made using your example.

https://sdk.scroll.pub/designer/#parsers%0A%20valueCell%0A%2...

I'm happy to chat more to nail that design if that would be helpful.

Of all the adjectives to use, why “modern”?

Very common these days. I don’t get it.

The docs don’t make it very obvious how are the environment variables actually applied. And I think .env files are much easier to manage and share. `envelope check` could be replaced with a CURRENT_ENV environment variable in an .env file. I can’t see how it would help avoid environment confusion more than $CURRENT_ENV displayed in your prompt would. (Or even better, not having production credentials on developers’ machines…)

Seems neat, but direnv can do more despite this claiming to be "modern".

> This way I am explicitly exporting the dev environment without relying on the fact that everything is in order in my .env file (another approach would be to have a .env.dev file)

What did you find lacking with the .env.dev approach? (Or if some tool doesn't support .env.dev could always symlink .env → .env.dev)

> I had the test database url commented out and the production one was not.

I feel like this is a giant red flag. Why on earth is your production database accessible from anywhere (ie your PC) without some kind of extra layer of security like a VPN or SSH tunnel?

Hmm I fairly recently started saving variables which tend to be shared among multiple projects in a central location, grouped in sh files and sourcing as needed. This gives me an idea to improve that flow...

When i deploy a webapp on azure, it expects me to put env variables in a file or their own tool (key value fields) where you can add env variables one by one.

Is there a way to use envelope in places like those?

envkey.com is also distributing environment variables

Any plans to support encryption at rest?

how do I install the damn thing??

you probably don’t need sql