Ask HN: Wouldn't it be much easier if you compress all env vars into one?

2 pointscrowdyriver4mo ago1 comments

In most apps I develop, there's at most 3 groups of environments, local - staging - prod.

Wouldn't it be easier to just join all env vars needed for each environment into a base64 encoded env var, and then just pass that into the given app?

I feel like there should be less room for error, and it's easy to add new services. There wouldn't be need for cloud vendors like vercel to namespace env vars, you would be already doing it yourself.

Yeah, maybe a small cli utility to generate those envs would be cool, but it looks like that wouldn't introduce much friction.

I can't be the first one to think about this, has this been tried?

Thanks for your input!

Edit: clarity

1 comments

rolph4mo ago

i think you want a flag register ?

not a hardware "bitflag" but a portable software configuration, made simple. [if hexadecimal words are simple]

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