Projects and environments

A vault holds projects, and each project holds environments such as development, staging and production. Every command works on the environment linked to the current directory, usually development. Pass -e <env> to use another.

Projects

A project is created the first time you write to it from a directory, along with a .dotsafe.json link file. Commit that file. To attach a directory to an existing project, or change its default environment:

dotsafe link my-api                    # this directory now uses the my-api projectdotsafe link my-api -e staging         # and staging by default

Inheritance

An environment can inherit another one in the same project. It gets all of the parent's variables, and its own values win.

dotsafe inherit production -e staging       # staging starts from productiondotsafe set -e staging LOG_LEVEL=debug      # and overrides one valuedotsafe unset -e staging --hide SENTRY_DSN  # drops one it shouldn't havedotsafe inherit --none -e staging           # stop inheriting

unset on its own removes the environment's own value, so the inherited one applies again. --hide removes the variable entirely. In the app, inherited and overridden variables are marked in the list.

References

A value can include other variables from the same environment with ${{ NAME }}. They're filled in when the value is read, so changing DB_HOST updates DB_URL too.

dotsafe set DB_HOST=db.internaldotsafe set 'DB_URL=postgres://${{ DB_HOST }}/app'   # single quotes, so the shell leaves it alone

In the app

• ⌘K finds a variable in any project and copies it, or jumps to an environment.
• ⌥⌘K or the menu bar icon does the same from any other app.
• Copied values are cleared from the clipboard after 30 seconds.

To share one value between projects, make it a secret.