from Hacker News

Better Environment Variable Management

by jdwyah on 12/5/23, 12:41 PM with 4 comments

• by thehucklecat on 12/5/23, 12:49 PM

  I definitely feel this pain. Changing environment variables at works sucks. JIRA ticket and then back and forth with SRE about whether we really need it.

  So it all goes in code and defeats the whole purpose of having the app be configurable.

  I don't know if secret management should be part of the same system though.

• by jdwyah on 12/5/23, 12:41 PM

  We had a dynamic configuration system for much of our configuration, but it didn't play well with environment variables.

  And environment variables are a must, because that's the easiest way to get terraform created config (via a configmap).

  We updated the dynamic configuration system so that a config value can now be "provided by" an environment variable. This is going a long way to helping us have a much more sane single place to look to understand all our configuration.

• by rubyissimo on 12/5/23, 1:01 PM

  This is only an issue if you have more than 1 language. Almost every language or framework has a good solution for configuration these days.