envs

Envs

envs is a simple tool to securely manage local environment variables.

When working with applications that are configured through environment variables (e.g. based on the principles from https://12factor.net/), it is common to have one or more collections of these, depending on the environment the application is run against (e.g. locally or a staging environment), envs allow you to easily manage collections of environment variables and inject the into you application.

Features

• Simple and easy to use
• Store variables in plain text files
• Easily encrypt files with sensitive information

Installation

You can install envs directly from source with

go install github.com/madss/envs@latest

Usage

Environment files

You can store collections of environment variables in plain text files. The format is similar to the output of env. Lines beginning with # and blank lines are ignored.

# Content of myenv.txt
HOST=localhost
PORT=8080
CACHE_DIR=/tmp

To securely store sensitive information, you can use the -e flag to encrypt the data (see below)

Injecting environment variables

To inject environment variables from the file myenv.txt into the program env, run

envs -f myenv.txt env

You can specify multiple files, like

envs -f myenv.txt -f myotherenv.txt env

By default only the environment variables from the specified files are included. If you need to include environment variables from the surrounding environment (e.g. $HOME), use the -i flag:

envs -i -f myenv.txt env

To export environment variables, you can use the -p flag to print the variables in a format suitable to eval.

eval $(envs -p -f myenv.txt)

Encrypting sensitive information

envs can create encrypted environment files, for storing sensitive information, using the -e flag. The user will be prompted for a password, and the program will afterwards read the content from stdin. The format is the same as described above. The encrypted data will be written to the specified file, or to the console if no file is specified.

envs -e -f mysecrets.bin

Injecting environment variables from encrypted files, works the same way as with regular files, except that the user will be prompted for a password for each encrypted file.

To avoid having to enter the password all the time, it can be provided by the environment variable ENVS_PASSWORD (but be careful not to leak it in your shells history).