varlock

Varlock

AI-safe .env files: Schemas for agents, Secrets for humans.

• 🤖 AI-safe config — agents read your schema, never your secrets
• 🔍 proactive leak scanning via varlock scan + git hooks
• 🔏 runtime protection — log redaction and leak prevention
• 🛡️ validation, coercion, type safety w/ IntelliSense
• 🌐 flexible multi-environment management — auto .env.* loading and explicit import
• 🔌 8 secret manager plugins (1Password, Infisical, AWS, Azure, GCP, Bitwarden, HashiCorp Vault, Pass)

See https://varlock.dev for full docs and examples.

A sample .env.schema:

# @currentEnv=$APP_ENV
# ---

# @type=enum(development, staging, production)
APP_ENV=development #sets default value

# API port
# @type=port @example=3000
API_PORT=

# API url including expansion of another env var
# @required @type=url
API_URL=localhost:${API_PORT}

# API key with validation, securely fetched from 1Password
# @required @sensitive @type=string(startsWith=sk-)
OPENAI_API_KEY=exec('op read "op://api-prod/openai/api-key"')

# Non-secret value, included directly
# @type=url
SOME_SERVICE_API_URL=https://api.someservice.com

Installation

You can get started with varlock by installing the CLI:

# Install as a dependency in a js project
npm install varlock

# OR as standalone CLI via homebrew
brew install dmno-dev/tap/varlock

# OR via cURL
curl -sSfL https://varlock.dev/install.sh | sh -s

See the full installation docs.

Workflow

Validate your .env.schema with:

varlock load

If you need to pass resolved env vars into another process, you can run:

varlock run -- node script.js

Or you can integrate more deeply with one of our integrations to get log redaction and leak prevention.

AI-Safe Config

Your .env.schema gives AI agents full context on your config — variable names, types, validation rules, descriptions — without ever exposing secret values. Combined with varlock scan to catch leaked secrets in AI-generated code, varlock is purpose-built for the AI era. Learn more in the AI-safe config guide.

@env-spec

Varlock is built on top of @env-spec, a new DSL for attaching a schema and additional functionality to .env files using JSDoc style comments. The @env-spec package contains a parser and info about the spec itself.

• @env-spec docs
• @env-spec RFC