I use a Makefile target with GPG :)

Sounds useful. We do similar things with encrypted properties files. Also, things like Ansible come with ansible vault. If you use Github, you can use Github secrets of course. And AWS/GCP/etc. tend to have secret stores.

The challenge with this solution is of course managing who has access and dealing with people leaving your team and no longer being trusted. Even if you still like them personally, just because they are outside your team would require you to change any credentials they might have.

In our case, our team is small and I simply ignore this problem. So, we have a keepass file with shared secrets and repositories with encrypted properties files and a master password in this keepass file. Mostly, it's just me handling the password. It also gets configured as a Github secret on repositories for CI and deployment jobs. It works. But I'm aware of the limitations.

This is an area where there are lots of tools but not a whole lot of standardized ones or good practices for using them. It's one of those things that acts as a magnet for enterprise complexity. Tools like this tend to become very unwieldy because of this. Which is why people keep reinventing them.

That looks amazing, thanks for sharing!

I have a git-based sync tool for my dotenv files. Maybe I can store my ssh keys, too

This actually looks handy for the “small team with a couple of env files” use case. Most secret-management tools are great once you’re at scale, but trying to explain sops or git-crypt to a team that just wants to stop pasting secrets into Slack is… not fun. A simple password-protected vault committed to git is a reasonable middle ground.

I like the OS keyring integration too,removes a lot of friction. Curious how it behaves in multi-machine workflows and whether you plan to add any guardrails around accidental plaintext commits, since that’s usually where lightweight tools get tripped up.

This is great! Coincidentally, I just started replacing my collection of bespoke security bash scripts with an app like yours. WIP here: https://github.com/leolimasa/age-vault

We all keep reinventing the same thing :)