Envers

Envers is a command-line tool (CLI) designed to manage and version environment variables for different deployment stages such as staging, development, and production. It provides a secure and organized way to handle environment-specific configurations.

Features

• Encrypt environment variables: Creates encrypted files that store environment variables that can be safely stored in a git repository
• Group-Based Configurations: Allows defining variables for different groups/profiles like prod, dev, etc.
• File-Based Variable Definitions: Supports multiple environment files (.env) with specific variables for each file.
• CLI-Driven: Provide CLI commands that helps to create drafts for environment variables and deploy it to encrypted files
• Spec Management: Each release has a defined spec that applies to all groups/profiles within that release.
• Environment File Generation: Enables generating .env files for specific versions and groups/profiles using commands.

Installation

TBD

Usage

Below are the initial subcommands for envers:

• envers init: Initialize the envers environment.
• envers deploy <spec version number>: Deploy a specific version from the spec file.
• envers draft <spec version number>: Create a new version draft in the spec file. Some variants of this command:
  • envers draft <spec version number> --from <previous spec version number>
  • envers draft <spec version number> --from-env .env
• envers profile-set --profile <profile_name> --spec <version_number>: Add new content.
• envers profile load --profile prod --spec <spec version>: Load a specific environment profile to files

envers init creates the spec file at .envers/.specs.yaml.

envers deploy creates the file .envers/.data.lock. This file is auto-generated by envers command, and it is encrypted.

The initial version of ./.envers/.specs.yaml would look like this:

version: 0.1 # the envers spec version
releases:

As you can see, it doesn't have too much information. If you want to draft a new version, you can run the following command:

$ envers draft 1.0

After this command, the .envers/specs.yaml file should look like this:

version: 0.1 # the spec version
releases:
  # placeholder: the version for the environment variables.
  #   if the status is draft, feel free to change the version number
  1.0:
    # status attribute is handled by command line, don't change it manually
    status: draft # options are: draft, cancelled, deployed
    # placeholder: update help with the real help text
    help:
    # placeholder: a list of available profiles (groups) for this version.
    #   at least one profile is required for the deploying
    profiles:
      - base
    # define the spec for that version, this spec should be used for all
    # profiles (groups) inside this version
    spec:
      # define the env file or any other kind of environment file to be used,
      # for now it just has support for .env files
      files:
        # placeholder: change `.env` to the correct dotenv file relative path
        .env:
          type: dotenv # default
          # `vars` is a dictionary for the environment variables
          # this defines the variables and some metadata, but not the real
          # value, because it is just the definition of the spec.
          vars:
            # placeholder: ENV is just a variable name, replace it by your real
            # environment variable
            ENV:
              type: string # options are: string, int, bool, path
              default: dev # in the case that the variable is not defined

Now, you can deploy your first version of environment variables:

$ envers deploy 1.0

When a version is deployed, it creates automatically all the new spec into the .envers/data.lock.

All the variables for the each profile and spec version is stored into .envers/data.lock, and this file shouldn't be changed for any reason.

Finally, we can create the environment variables for the base profile:

$ envers profile set --profile base --spec 1.0

envers will ask you via prompt the value for each variable defined in the spec for version 1.0.

Roadmap

• Integration with Ansible Vault for encryption.
• Detailed spec and content management functionalities.
• Enhancements in versioning and group management.
• Integration with makim and sugar.

Contributing

https://osl-incubator.github.io/envers

License

BSD-Clause 3