Store Environment Variables in your 1Password secrets and retrieve them on-demand for use in temporary shells. Good for using AWS credentials from your terminal without having to store them on disk.

brew tap jagregory/tools
brew install 1password-env

The 1password-cli is required. You can install it with Homebrew Cask: brew cask install 1password-cli

Before you can use op-env you need to set up your secrets. In your 1Password vault, create or edit a secret and add a new section called "env". Any fields you add in this "env" section will be exported as Environment Variables in your Terminal when you use op-env.

op-env takes one argument: the name of a 1Password secret.

$ op-env my-secret

When you run op-env it will try to read the secret from your 1Password vault. If you haven't used op-env before (or for a while) you will need to supply your Vault credentials. op-env will re-use your 1Password session for as long as it can, but eventually it will be locked out and you'll need to re-authenticate.

After unlocking your vault and locating the secret, op-env will launch a new sub-shell (using your $SHELL) which has the variables from your secret exported. The variables are not available anywhere outside of this sub-shell.

🔒 Temporary shell for my-secret 🔒

~/dev $ echo $A_SECRET
this is in 1Password

op-env uses the 1Password CLI for most of the heavy lifting. The procedure op-env runs through when it launches a shell is as follows:

1. Try to restore a previously used op-env session by reading and exporting the contents of ~/.1password-env/session and ~/.1password-env/defaults
2. Check to see if there's an active 1Password CLI session. Call op get account which will return successfully if there's an active session
3. If no active session, prompt the user for their preferred Vault, Email Address, and the Secret Key for the vault. Sign in to the 1Password CLI with these values: op signin <vault> <email> <secretkey>. Store the resulting session token in ~/.1password-env/session, and the Vault and Email in ~/.1password-env/defaults
4. Retrieve the requested secret from 1Password with op get item <secret>, perform some jq JSON manipulation to turn the "env" section into key-value environment variable pairs.
5. Launch a new shell using env $vars $SHELL

The intention of this tool is to reduce the exposure of your environment variables by making them short lived and not permanently persistent on disk. It is not intended to protect you from active snooping.

op-env creates a subshell with env for injecting variables. The injected variables are only visible inside the subshell, once the shell is closed they are gone. There are a couple of exceptions to this (and hence the above caveat about snooping):

1. The root user of your system and the user who executed op-env can call ps and inspect the environment variables of the processes they launched (or all if you're root)
2. The root user can inspect /proc/$pid/environ and list the environment variables of a running process.

In both these cases, the environment variables of the sub-shell created by op-env will include the dynamically created variables from your 1Password secret.

On modern operating systems, only your own user and root have these privileges, and therefore this is a low risk.

op-env will try to reuse the 1Password session it used previously, so it can try to avoid making you enter your Secret Key too frequently. To reuse a session, op-env persists the 1Password session token and reads it on next run.

The following files are created:

1. ~/.1password-env/session which contains your OP_SESSION_<vault> token
2. ~/.1password-env/defaults which contains the Vault name and the Email Address for the vault you last accessed

The files in ~/.password-env are readable only the user who executed op-env. The token is valid for roughly 30 minutes after last use. The Vault name and Email address are useless without your Secret Key (which isn't persisted anywhere).

You may store ~/.1password-env/defaults in a dotfiles repository. Storing ~/.1password-env/session is unnecessary.