kelseyhightower/envconfig VS sops

To configure the app I'd take a look at https://github.com/kelseyhightower/envconfig

envconfig

- Having one way of configuring the app is excellent. You can either prefer environment variables, a file, or flags. You can do what Viper does by reading the file and unmarshalling it. The built-in flag package is enough for your flag-based config needs. If you want to prefer environment variables, I prefer https://github.com/kelseyhightower/envconfig

To extract values from the system environment, I utilize envconfig, a Go package. Envconfig facilitates mapping system environment variables to a Go struct. These Go structs are exposed through a config package, enabling other parts of the application to access them.

You could prefix your env vars and use this package. https://github.com/kelseyhightower/envconfig

kelseyhightower/envconfig

Pretty much all of our services and pkgs use https://github.com/kelseyhightower/envconfig. It’s dead simple, gets out of your way, and is battle tested

https://github.com/kelseyhightower/envconfig (read config from environment variables, more succinct than viper)

Mozilla SOPS (Secrets OPerationS) is an open-source command-line tool for managing and storing secrets. It uses secure encryption methods to encrypt secrets at rest and decrypt them at runtime. SOPS supports a variety of key management systems, including AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, and PGP. It's particularly useful in a DevOps context where sensitive data like API keys, passwords, or certificates need to be securely managed and seamlessly integrated into application workflows.

Encrypted secrets thanks to SOPS and Age

We do the exact same thing to keep track of some credentials we use sops[1] and AWS KMS to separate credentials by sensitivity, then use the git differ to view the diffs between the encrypted secrets

Definitely not best practice security-wise, but it works well

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

For anyone new to SOPS like I was - https://github.com/getsops/sops

I've found this is largely solved by strictly separating plain config and secrets, and then having secrets pull from GCP secret manager / vault / whatever.

You can then commit all the config (including the secret identifiers) and it all just works so long as you're authenticated with your secret storage system.

We do this for the live configuration as well in line with Gitops and find it to work well.

If you don't want to use a cloud secret manager you can also use something like https://github.com/getsops/sops to commit the encrypted secrets safely

Basically, the simpler the better --just encrypt your secrets and check them in to version control.

We use SOPS[0] for this, and have found it to be pretty nice.

[0]: https://github.com/getsops/sops

The answer is that secrets shouldn't be stored in the git repo at all, but somewhere safe like a password manager or Mozilla's SOPS which people seem to love.

Unfortunately, the SOPS project is in some sort of a limbo state and there has been quite a long period with limited maintenance and unclear position from Mozilla. Despite the project being accepted into the CNCF, it's still unclear what will happen with it going forward.

It looks like the software you're intending to use is oriented towards interacting with desktop Linux's keyring. While you can probably get this to work, I would recommend using something like sops as it's a more standardized way of storing secrets in configuration.