Loading secrets

Loading secrets

To load secrets in your app, you can use the registerAsync function from fatima/api.

import { env } from "env";

async function main() {
  if(env.ENVIRONMENT === "development") {
    const { registerAsync } = await import("fatima/api")

    await registerAsync();
  }
}

This will load secrets as specified in your env.config.ts, or from the .env file if you don't have anything configured.

Make sure to only run this in development, for production you should load secrets through your hosting platform, or through other means, but not through fatima API or CLI.

Loading secret synchronously

If you need to load secrets synchronously, you can use the register function from fatima/register.

import { register } from "fatima/api";

register();

Or just

import "fatima/register";

CI/CD

Before building your app, you need to run fatima generate.

In CI/CD environments, all needed secrets should already be available as environment variables, so all you gotta run is

npx fatima@latest generate --process-env

The --process-env flag tells Fatima to load secrets from the environment variables instead of the .env file, which is the default behavior.

In case you need to build a secret loader, you can use providers object returned by fatima to fetch secrets.

CLI vs API

Previously, Fatima had two commands: fatima run and fatima dev.

Both of them were responsible for loading secrets and running your app, but they had different use cases.

Fatima dev was intended for long running processes, like a your development server, while fatima run was intended for one-off commands, like a migration or seeding script.

Ultimately the library evolved and now discourages the usage of CLI to load secrets, fatima dev was deprecated and fatima run should only be when you want to test something, or when you need to inject secrets in a process you don't control.

Generally, we should avoid enveloping processes with other processes. That's why we recommend using fatima/api or fatima/register to load secrets and run your app, instead of fatima run.