Best Practices for Describing Keys?

[bmulholland]

It's easy to lose track of the purpose of keys, and it's easy to keep around keys that are no longer needed. To combat that, our current credentials approach stores a descriptive comment alongside each secret. This appears not to be possible in EnvKey; I couldn't even see a way to add text like this as a commit message. What do other EnvKey users do to solve these problems? Where to document each key, and how to ensure it stays up to date? Does EnvKey have a feature like this planned?

[danenania]

Good question @bmulholland. A per-variable notes/comment feature is definitely on the roadmap and we have some groundwork laid for it. As with just about everything in EnvKey, including variable names, we want these notes to be end-to-end encrypted, so it is a bit more complex than it might sound. Certainly still doable though!

While not particularly elegant, I suppose in the meantime you could add a VARIABLE_COMMENT below each VARIABLE you want to document, or else keep a separate file for this purpose in source control.

[drcongo]

A vaguely related possible feature request here could be variable grouping / scoping - even if that's just a presentational nicety on top of the desktop UI. I'm thinking for example a group called POSTGRES with variables inside for HOST, PASSWORD etc. which would be accessed as POSTGRES_HOST and POSTGRES_PASSWORD. We've ended up with quite a lot of stuff stored in our EnvKey projects, only some of which is needed on the remote servers, so this could also enable the ability to group vars by why they're needed - ie a CI group. You'd probably still want the comments feature though, as that could give the context of each group too.

[danenania]

Hey @drcongo, could the blocks feature possibly fit what you're looking for in terms of variable grouping?

[drcongo]

Not quite I don't think, as this looks like it would share the values across projects - this does look like a super useful feature that I had no idea existed though and would definitely help reduce the number of variables we have per project!

[danenania]

That's good to hear! You're right that it's mainly intended to share values across projects, but if you extract groups of vars into blocks and then include them in just a single project, it would in effect break those vars up into different sections in the UI as you're describing. It's true though that we could make grouping vars within a single app a bit smoother than this even if it uses blocks underneath.

[drcongo]

Ahh, got you. That's a pretty clever workaround, thanks!