alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Lockenv – Simple encrypted secrets storage for Git
Hi!
I got tired of setting up tools I can't explain to a team in a few words like sops or git-crypt, just to store few files with environment variables or secrets, so I built lockenv as a simple alternative.
It's basically a password-protected vault file you commit to git. No gpg keys, no cloud, just lockenv init, set a password, and lock/unlock the secrets.
This tool integrates with OS keyring, so you're not typing passwords constantly. Should work on Mac/Linux/Windows, but I tested it only on linux so far.
I am not trying to replace any mature / robust solution, just making small tool for simple cases, where I want to stop sharing secrets via slack.
Feel free to try, thank you!
Comments
Sounds useful. We do similar things with encrypted properties files. Also, things like Ansible come with ansible vault. If you use Github, you can use Github secrets of course. And AWS/GCP/etc. tend to have secret stores.
The challenge with this solution is of course managing who has access and dealing with people leaving your team and no longer being trusted. Even if you still like them personally, just because they are outside your team would require you to change any credentials they might have.
In our case, our team is small and I simply ignore this problem. So, we have a keepass file with shared secrets and repositories with encrypted properties files and a master password in this keepass file. Mostly, it's just me handling the password. It also gets configured as a Github secret on repositories for CI and deployment jobs. It works. But I'm aware of the limitations.
This is an area where there are lots of tools but not a whole lot of standardized ones or good practices for using them. It's one of those things that acts as a magnet for enterprise complexity. Tools like this tend to become very unwieldy because of this. Which is why people keep reinventing them.
This is great! Coincidentally, I just started replacing my collection of bespoke security bash scripts with an app like yours. WIP here: https://github.com/leolimasa/age-vault
We all keep reinventing the same thing :)
This actually looks handy for the “small team with a couple of env files” use case. Most secret-management tools are great once you’re at scale, but trying to explain sops or git-crypt to a team that just wants to stop pasting secrets into Slack is… not fun. A simple password-protected vault committed to git is a reasonable middle ground.
I like the OS keyring integration too,removes a lot of friction. Curious how it behaves in multi-machine workflows and whether you plan to add any guardrails around accidental plaintext commits, since that’s usually where lightweight tools get tripped up.
That looks amazing, thanks for sharing!
I have a git-based sync tool for my dotenv files. Maybe I can store my ssh keys, too
I use a Makefile target with GPG :)
Very similar to a tool I built about a year ago! We've been using it with our 6-person team, and it's been working great. It uses a shared keyring.json to manage public keys, so we don’t have to duplicate the same keys across every repo.
https://github.com/stefanoverna/kavo
It’s built on top of age for encryption (https://github.com/FiloSottile/age).