Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by black3r 1229 days ago
The author mentions .env files come from 12factor design, but the 12factor way is just using environment variables directly for configuration.., Environment variables by themselves are language/library agnostic by design and aren't supposed to be cross-platform by design (they're meant to be tied to the "environment" which includes OS)

If you're storing config in a .env file that's read directly by your application (as opposed to sourcing it by your shell or reading it with docker when launching your container), you might just as well use any other file format for your config and call it a config file, not .env.., it'll still be 12factor compatible if the config would still be overridable by environment variables directly...
3 comments
mangecoeur 1229 days ago
Indeed, the whole point of the 12 factor design is to decouple the app from a single config file. Instead you use whatever method you like to define environment variables and the app should just work. Also helps avoid committing secrets to your git repo.

I use SystemD extensively and it's pretty neat, you just: - Define default Environment variables in your unit file - Customize a service by adding an overrides.conf file in foo.service.d/ folder This makes it easy to define exactly the environment for a service.

.env files are helpful in dev mode to customise machines where I don't want to pollute the system env, but they aren't the 'config format' and it makes sense that they are specific to the OS/shell they need to run in.

link
whalesalad 1229 days ago
Yes! I’ve really disliked the tendency recently to treat .env files as a sidecar database versus being actual environment variables. Keeping them as KEY=value newline delimited text makes them far more versatile and usable in shell environments.
link
jrs235 1229 days ago
>you might just as well use any other file format for your config and call it a config file, not .env

If you name it .env it's much easier to setup source control rules to exclude .env files. If you name them say .config, then you increase the chances of accidentally leaking creds (by checking them into the repo).

link