One developer, eleven side projects
No team, no compliance requirement, and a key problem anyway — because the projects outnumber the memory.
- The setup
- One person. Several active projects, more dormant ones, two machines.
- In play
- .env filesMultiple providersTwo machinesNo CI
There is no team to coordinate with and no auditor to satisfy, so every enterprise secrets tool is overkill by an order of magnitude. The problem is not governance, it is inventory.
Eleven projects means eleven .env files in eleven directories, some on the laptop, some on the desktop, some in a folder from 2024 that still has a live key in it.
What breaks
Which key belongs to which project
Coming back to a dormant project after four months, the .env is there but there is no record of which provider account the key came from, whether it is still valid, or whether it is the same one another project uses.
The second machine drifts
A key added on the laptop is not on the desktop. You find out when you sit down to work on the wrong machine and something 401s.
Dormant projects keep live keys
The projects you are not working on are the ones with forgotten credentials still active. They are also the ones you will never remember to audit.
How it works here
Keys grouped by project, not by directory
The vault organises around projects, so the answer to "what does this project need" is a list rather than an archaeology exercise.
Structure syncs, encrypted, across both machines
Sign in and project structure syncs as an opaque encrypted blob — the server cannot read a project name, let alone a key. Both machines see the same vault after you unlock it.
Works fully offline first
You do not need an account to use the vault. Sign-in exists for sync and teams; without it everything stays in local encrypted storage.
Import what you already have
Point the importer at an existing .env and it reads the whole file in. Getting eleven projects in is eleven imports, not a hundred manual entries.
Closest to your setup?
Install the extension, import an existing .env, and check the fit against your own projects. It works offline and nothing is uploaded unless you sign in.