Many developers use a custom package or solution for managing environment variables. We, for example, use the package Dotenvx. However, Vercel doesn’t support custom env variable management tools on runtime. Especially when the application is not built within the Vercel infrastructure. We use our own CI/CD pipeline to build the Vercel application, and deploy it to Vercel using “vercel deploy --prebuilt”.
Dotenvx allows us to include encrypted environment variables in our application, which is very nice, because only a single set of environment variables is needed for all platforms. At the moment we have environment variables all over the place (local / Gitlab / Vercel).
Currently, we found a workaround for this problem by injecting all individual .env variables from the .env file into the Vercel environment by using the “–env” flag of the Vercel-CLI. But once we perform a redeploy, all environment variables are gone (non-persistent)
It would be great if Vercel could support Dotenvx on runtime: automatically inject the pair of decryption keys on the start of the application, and load the variables again on a redeploy through the Vercel-UI.
I think this can be a very useful addition to the existing Vercel environment variable infrastructure