@tka85/dotenvenc

NOTE: This is an improved version of the now deprecated dotenvenc.

Are you using .env and it contains secrets like passwords & tokens?

And are you using dotenv to expose those secrets as process.env variables to your app?

Problem: you are exposing the secrets in plain text in your repository and your production system.

Solution: you can now save your .env encrypted as .env.enc, then decrypt it during runtime only in memory (never on disk) and transparently get the same functionality as you enjoyed from dotenv.

Benefits

• Secure! ✔ You can safely commit into your codebase the encrypted .env.enc without compromosing your secrets
• Secure!! ✔ Your secrets exist unencrypted only in memory during runtime; never on disk
• Secure!!! ✔ Secrets protected with strong encryption (AES-256)
• Handy! ✔ Comes with CLI script dotenvenc for easily updating your .env.enc from your local (uncommitted) .env
• Lean! ✔ Still maintain a single dependency but now on dotenvenc instead of dotenv
• Easy! ✔ Transition from dotenv replacing a single line of code
• Flexible! ✔ Not limited to .env and .env.enc i.e. you can set any custom filenames for the encrypted and unencrypted files
• Modern! ✔ Fully re-written in Typescript

Tip

Add .env in your .gitignore so your unencrypted secrets are guaranteed to never get committed in your codebase.

New feature in v5.2.0

Each time you encrypt your .env now you get additionally to the .env.enc also a file .env.enc.readable (or if you are using a custom env file, the same named with a .enc.readable suffix). This file contains the variable names in human readable form, and the values are the HMAC digests of the corresponding .env values. Why? So that you can see each time you re-generate the encrypted .env.enc, which variables have potentially changed.

CAUTION

If this .readable file is committed to a public repository, it exposes you to the danger that, even though HMAC is a cryptographic hash function which is designed to be difficult to reverse, an attacker might attempt a brute force or dictionary attack and expose your secrets.

Installation

npm i @tka85/dotenvenc

Encryption

You have a .env (or custom-named unencrypted secrets file) and you will generate a .env.enc (or custom-named file) which is encrypted and safe to commit.

You can use the handy command-line script dotenvenc that comes installed with the package. Just run it without arguments to see the help page.

Step 1 (optional)

Convenient option

Save the encryption/decryption password you will be using in the environment variable DOTENVENC_PASS in your .bashrc (or .bash_profile):

export DOTENVENC_PASS='mySuperDuperPassword';

and reload it:

source ~/.bashrc

Upon runtime your app will use this env variable when reading the encrypted .env.enc to decrypt it and populate your process.env (see following section Decryption on how to do this).

But setting this env variable is also helpful for the CLI tool dotenvenc. If DOTENVENC_PASS is set, the dotenvenc script will not prompt you each time to type the password for encryption/decryption.

Secure option

For maximum security, do not save the DOTENVENC_PASS not even as an environment variable in your .bashrc. If it is not set, the application will ask for it upon startup before it can proceed to decrypt .env.enc and populate your process.enc.

Step 2: encrypt .env

Note: you will have to repeat this step each time you make changes to a secret in your unencrypted .env and need to reflect it into the encrypted .env.enc.

If your unencrypted secrets file is .env and resides at the root of the project, then simply:

./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -e

will prompt you (x2) for an encryption password (unless DOTENVENC_PASS is set) and proceed to generate an encrypted secrets file .env.enc.

And if your unencrypted secrets file is not named the default .env, we have you covered:

./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -e -i /path/to/my/secrets-env-filename

will prompt you (x2) for an encryption password (unless DOTENVENC_PASS is set) and proceed to generate an encrypted secrets file .env.enc.

And if you don't want to name the encrypted secrets file .env.enc, we also have you covered:

./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -e -i /path/to/my/secrets-env-filename -o /another/place/to/my/encrypted-secrets-env-filename

will prompt you (x2) for an encryption password (unless DOTENVENC_PASS is set) and proceed to generate an encrypted secrets file /another/place/to/my/encrypted-secrets-env-filename.

Decryption

Let's assume the contents of the .env that you encrypted into .env.enc are:

DB_PASS='superDuperPassword'
SECRET_TOKEN='noMoreSecrets'

For all possible decryption scenarios that follow, the principle is:

• If you have set env var DOTENVENC_PASS, no additional step is needed
• If you have not set env var DOTENVENC_PASS, you will be prompted to supply the decryption password before proceeding

You can now populate the process.env in your app's code as follows:

require('dotenvenc').decrypt();
// From here on your app will have access to the secrets through `process.env.DB_PASS` and `process.env.SECRET_TOKEN`

or in ES6:

import { decrypt } from 'dotenvenc';
decrypt();
// From here on your app will have access to the secrets through `process.env.DB_PASS` and `process.env.SECRET_TOKEN`

If you used a custom encrypted filename:

require('dotenvenc').decrypt({ encryptedFile: './somewhere/.secrets.custom.enc'});
// From here on your app will have access to the secrets through `process.env.DB_PASS` and `process.env.SECRET_TOKEN`

or in ES6:

import { decrypt } from 'dotenvenc';
decrypt({ encryptedFile: './somewhere/.secrets.custom.enc'});
// From here on your app will have access to the secrets through `process.env.DB_PASS` and `process.env.SECRET_TOKEN`

Recovery of unencrypted secrets file

You want to decrypt and view the contents of your encrypted secrets file? A new team member wants to recreate the .env upon checkout of the project? (remember that .env is an unversioned file) Or you want to recreate the .env because it got lost or corrupted?

You can use the same handy command-line dotenvenc you used to initially encrypt your unencrypted .env secrets file.

Using the script's -d flag:

./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -d

or if you used custom name instead of the default .env.enc:

./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -d -i ./somewhere/.secrets.custom.enc

In both cases you will be prompted to provide the password that was used to create the encrypted file (if DOTENVENC_PASS is not set) and, assuming the password is correct, you will have the contents printed on the screen in the format:

VAR1=VALUE1
VAR2=VALUE2
...

Bonus

You can dump the contents of your encrypted secrets file as shell export statements.

Using the script's -x flag:

./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -x -i ./somewhere/.secrets.custom.enc

This will print on console:

export VAR1=VALUE1;
export VAR2=VALUE2;

How is that useful?

Using the shell's eval in a shell script you can populate your environment dynamically without ever storing the sensitive information on disk.

eval `./node_modules/.bin/dotenvenc -x`
# all commands following in the script will now have access to the env variables

Comments

Anything following a # sign in the .env file, is stripped. That means you can have full line comments:

# the whole line is a comments because it start with a "#"

or inline comments:

VAR="a value" # text before the "#" is kept; text following the "#" is stripped

Inspired by

• Keeping passwords in source control
• envenc
• Based on the now deprecated dotenvenc