We've supported .env integration for managing secrets, but it has several issues:
Apps are disconnected from their secrets - applications lack a clear contract about which secrets they need
Parsing .env is unclear - comments, multiline values, and special characters all have ambiguous behavior across different parsers
Password manager integration is difficult - requiring manual copy-paste or template workarounds
Vendor lock-in - applications use custom parsing logic, making it hard to switch providers
No encryption - .env files are stored as plain text, vulnerable to accidental commits or unauthorized access
solutions like dotenvx to encrypt .env files or sops for general secret encryption, these bring new challenges:
Single key management - requires distributing and managing a master key
Trust requirements - everyone with the key can decrypt all secrets
Rotation complexity - departing team members require key rotation and re-encrypting all secrets
Larger teams often adopt solutions like #OpenBao (the open source fork of #HashiCorp Vault), requiring significant infrastructure and operational overhead. Smaller teams face a gap between simple .env files and complex enterprise solution
What if instead of choosing one tool, we declared secrets uniformly and let each environment use its best provider?
#devenv
https://devenv.sh/blog/2025/07/21/announcing-secretspec-declarative-secrets-management/