How Varlock Fixes .env Vulnerabilities and Secures Your Secrets

Dec 10, 2025

Guest

Theo Ephraim

Guest

Phil Miller

Phil Miller and Theo Ephraim, co-creators of Varlock, dive into modern secrets management. They discuss the chaotic world of traditional .env files and how Varlock transforms them into structured schemas with validation. The duo explains pulling secrets securely from tools like 1Password, protecting sensitive values, and ensuring safety in AI-driven interactions. They also highlight managing multiple environments with a single configuration and the push for an open env-spec standard, making development smoother and more efficient.

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INSIGHT

.env Copy-Paste Is Unsustainable

Environment variables and .env copy-paste workflows break down as teams and services grow and cause secret sprawl.
Varlock centralizes configuration, turning examples into a living schema to prevent drift and manual glue code.

ADVICE

Schema Your .env And Use Functions

Use a schema for your env file so requiredness, types, and docs live with the variables and never go out of sync.
Add plugin-backed functions to fetch secrets from CLIs like 1Password instead of placing secrets in plain text.

INSIGHT

Treat Sensitivity As Metadata

Marking which items are sensitive lets the system treat public and secret config together and enforce handling consistently.
Varlock generates TypeScript types and docs from decorator-style comments to improve DX and runtime safety.

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Environment variables and secrets are usually a mess: out of sync .env files, scattered API keys, painful onboarding, and brittle CI configs. In this episode of the Modern Web Podcast, Rob Ocel talks with Varlock co-creators Phil Miller and Theo Ephraim about how Varlock turns .env files into a real schema with types, validation, and documentation, pulls secrets from tools like 1Password and other backends, and centralizes configuration across environments and services. They also dig into protecting secrets in an AI-heavy world by redacting them from logs and responses, preventing accidental leaks from agents, and pushing toward an open env-spec standard so configuration becomes predictable, portable, and actually pleasant to work with.

What you will learn:

- Why traditional .env files and copy paste workflows break down as teams, services, and environments grow.

- How Varlock turns environment variables into a schema with types, validation, documentation, and generated TypeScript.- How to pull secrets from tools like 1Password and other backends without leaving them in plain text or scattering them across dashboards.

- How to manage multiple environments such as development, staging, and production from a single, declarative configuration source.

- How Varlock helps protect secrets in AI and MCP workflows by redacting them from logs and responses and blocking accidental leaks.

- What the env spec standard is and how a common schema format can make configuration more portable across tools, templates, and platforms.

Theo Ephraim on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theo-ephraim/

Phil Miller on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themillman/

Rob Ocel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robocel/

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