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I feel like with everything in computer science/software engineering, there are tradeoffs to every solution.

What do you think are the positive benefits of .env files compared to what the author is saying?

In devenc, you shouldnt need a ton of secrets anyhow. Each dev should have many of their own unique "secret" bits.

Being able to roatate a secret in devenv & have things keep working is early intermediate maturity model, but I'd wager most orgs have nothing.

This isn't a dotenv problem, isn't a security problem. It's that no one has soaked time or your department stoggily refuses to try out the really good Ansible or whatnot env to set your various microservices up for local dev.

I use a python library called python_dotenv, which like the article describes, loads environment variables from a .env file. My use cases are for just tiny personal projects, but, I do like how the process is the same on my laptop and my web host. If i were to use some specific technology with digital ocean, I would still need to do something for when I'm building this stuff locally.

Generally speaking the only thing I'm holding in my .env file is the Django secret key, and the debug flag, so, pretty limited use case, but works well I think. I manually create the .env file when setting up my site, so none of it goes into any repos.

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