Mark environment variable value as optional

Hey community!

The Environments feature came into a very fitting point for our team’s new project. We’re currently experimenting with it in order to replace the .env.template file conventionally used to denote the list of variables needed in a local dev env.

There’s a small issue however (very similar use case to Tillman’s). Not all developers need all variables, and additionally there are variables that are personal to each user.

So, after short experimentation we thought of the following suggestion: What if, alongside the key/value pairs that are persisted in the .env file (common for all users that have access to the .env file), there was a different entry type whose value wasn’t synced to the upstream?

This way, 1. all users with access to the .env file would always have the up-to-date list of all variables used in the project, but 2. would be able to leave some values empty and let the code decide how to handle this case, and 3. would be able to add personal values (eg. API keys even via secret references) without leaking them to the rest of the users.

What do you think?