How can you have private environment variables outside of dev.nix?

General
1

Codespaces has secrets that you set that aren’t checked into git or put into a config file. Is there any way to do something like that?

2

Hi @treeder - one of the items we are actively looking at it is using Cloud Secret Manager for managing private values: Secret Manager  |  Google Cloud

If we go that route, would that work for what you are trying to do?

Cheers,
Kirupa

3

Seems like that could work. Not sure if having it tied to a particular GCP project would be a pain or not though, would have to think that through. I’d likely end up having a lot of GCP projects that would only be used for the secret manager.

4

Sorry for reviving a old post, but I found a workaround, hope this would help someone (or at least future me)
dev.idx

let
  secrets = import ./secrets.nix;
in
{ pkgs, ... }: {
  env = pkgs.lib.recursiveUpdate {
    # Normal environment variables here
  } secrets;
  # Your config

secrets.nix

{
    PORT=3000;
}
1 Like
5

Forgot to mention, remember to add secrets.nix onto .gitignore

1 Like