this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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.envfiles are wild to me, environment variables have never been a good way to pass data to applications, let alone secret data.So the solution people came up with was to store them in plain text next to the binary, and then have a loader apply them before running the main app.
But they needed those .env files to transplant an entire software stack from the developer's laptop into production in a reproducible manner! How else were they ever going to get software into prod? By good documentation, broad version requirements, and following the Robustness Principle? Ha! How are you supposed to move fast and break things then?
The data isn't supposed to be secret, I think. We use
.envfiles to store creds required for development, like a connection url for my local database. Production apps don't use.envfiles at all.