Alternatives
Products that do what I just fixed .env once and for all – better-env does
.env files have always felt archaic, insecure, clunky and honestly just not fun to work with. I see my friends (and myself) accidentally committing them all the time. Managing secrets across projects becomes a mess of copy-pasting keys into scattered env files with no real way to sync anything. So I built better-env: a secure, developer-friendly alternative to .env. Store your secrets once in a global encrypted store, and load them per-project at runtime. I’d love feedback on whether this feels useful beyond solo devs, and what you’d want for teams or CI setups. Fully open source:…
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Now that I have your attention (“Don’t you dare version control environment files!!”, “This can’t be safe.”) and before you tear me and my project to shreds, please allow me to take a moment to celebrate something small but meaningful: I’ve finally released a thing. Thank you. Motivation tl;dr: The existing tools and libraries for versioning and syncing environment files / secrets across team members and CI machines just didn’t cut it for me. So, I set out to create my own solution — one finally checks all my boxes. So what is places-env? (I encourage you to check the readme…
2024 · github.com
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Hi! I've been frustrated with the secret sharing situation in serverside javascript land for a while; the common thing is to just toss .env files around on Slack to get someone's app working, or involves some kind of convoluted setup to get a blob from a storage and turn it into environment variables via commands I have to copy paste every time. But everyone uses secret storage providers, e.g. shared password vaults, cloud secrets, etc., so why not leverage those as URIs in a JSON file that can be checked in to source control? I want something simple that would just generate the darn .env…
2025 · github.com
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2017 · envkey.com
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Hi HN, I built Envs.AI, a free tool to solve the headache of managing environment variables across different environments and platforms. Envs.AI lets you store all your environment variables in one secure place and easily integrate them with Jenkins, Python, and other platforms in your tech stack. No more scattered .env files or sharing secrets through Slack messages. Some features: - Central repository for all env variables - Secure storage with proper access controls - Simple integration with CI/CD pipelines - Easy access via API for different languages and frameworks - Team…
2025 · envs.ai
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When someone here told me to focus on something more useful than reinventing the wheel. So. EnvCloak, a lightweight and simple tool for securely managing sensitive environment files. The design focuses on simplicity - just a few intuitive commands using the Click Python library. I assume seamless integration with CI/CD workflows. The aim is to provide a streamlined solution without the need for clunky tools. If you're tired of complex configurations or bloated alternatives, this might be worth a look! I would appreciate any feedback, feature ideas or input on how to improve this…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, I built KeyEnv because I was tired of the "can you Slack me the Stripe key?" workflow. The problem: My team's secrets lived in a mix of Slack DMs, shared Google Docs, and .env files that definitely weren't in .gitignore at some point. Enterprise tools like Vault required more DevOps time than we had. Doppler was close but felt heavier than we needed. What KeyEnv does: keyenv init # link project keyenv pull # sync secrets to local .env keyenv run -- npm start # inject secrets, run command That's basically it. Secrets are encrypted client-side (AES-256-GCM) before leaving your machine.…
Jan 2026 · keyenv.dev
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I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
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Hey HN, As most of you (I think?), I cannot learn something without having a project, on the side, to implement what I’ve just learned. Recode is the project that I've used to learn Go. It lets you create a development environment in your cloud provider account easily. You can think of it as a desktop version of Gitpod / Coder / GitHub Codespaces less polished and with less features but 100% free and open-source. At the time of writing, it only works with Visual Studio Code and AWS. In order to let you configure your development environments easily, I’ve chosen to use Docker with…
2022 · github.com
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hello! After receiving some great traction here a few weeks back (65.03k unique visitors/ 539.22k total requests/ +11x user sign ups), Stephen and I rolled up our sleeves and made some improvements based on the feedback y'all had. → Migrated the entire infrastructure from Heroku to DigitalOcean w/ Docker → Added functionality for data exports to markdown (take your data anywhere) → Added in a sustainability model with Lemon Squeezy subscription payments → Migrated to a Vite-based build system → Migrated from vuex to pinia for Vue.js state management → Made improvements to the…
2024
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I'm the creator of node.js' dotenv. I'm making a better dotenv called dotenvx. * run anywhere (cross-platform) * multi-environment * encrypted envs What do you think?
2024 · github.com
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2014 · gregosuri.com
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So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
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I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731 Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project. Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones. p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress.
2012
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2012 · antiqua.io
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2018 · github.com
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2024 · github.com
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2021 · mdbgo.com
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Been using it for about a year now in production, but rewrote it completely in golang. My first go project so far. I wanted to have something that would make my life easier. A lot of tools nowaday kinda push you towards functional deployments and that usually doesn't work for me since I like stuff like LiveView by Phoenix and Websocket stuff in general. Old vercel deployments back when they allowed to deploy docker containers was a godsend, but since they don't offer that anymore I had to use services like fly.io(which is amazing) or heroku. However I wanted something selfhosted that I could…
2024 · deploywithjig.askh.at
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I got tired of: - .env files committed to Git (seen it happen 100+ times) - API keys shared in Slack - Wondering who has access to what secrets So I built Liberty - a CLI tool that replaces .env files with hardware-bound encryption. How it works: $ pip install liberty-secrets $ liberty add DATABASE_URL postgresql://... $ liberty add STRIPE_KEY sk-... $ liberty exec npm start Secrets are encrypted with a key derived from your machine's hardware (CPU ID + machine ID + disk serial). If someone steals your .liberty vault file, it's useless on their machine. Features: - Hardware-bound…
Jan 2026
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Hi Guys, I built SecretEnv to help solve one common thing that I have seen at every org, that I have worked at. We always had more than one password/credential manager. Service tokens maybe in Vault, AWS SSM etc and some team specific service account or temp account credentials being store in another password store such as 1Password or Keeper, there was never one single credential store. This is where SecretEnv comes in play, it runs any command with secrets injected as env vars, sourced from whatever combination of backend your team already uses. I am sure there are other tools as well…
May 2026 · github.com
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