Be careful if you are in the habit of using environment variables to specify API...

eksith · on May 19, 2013

Is it a good idea to keep passwords in environment variables?

Isn't it safer to create a credentials file and give it the appropriate chmod?

calpaterson · on May 19, 2013

From a deployment point of view, environment variables are a pretty good choice.

http://www.12factor.net/config

vacri · on May 20, 2013

vacri@devbox:~$ ps aux | grep elasticsearch

112 6725 0.1 36.7 1965924 1411164 ? SLl May03 37:11 /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64//bin/java -Xms1g -Xmx1g -Xss256k -Djava.awt.headless=true -XX:+UseParNewGC -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=75 -XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Delasticsearch -Des.pidfile=/var/run/elasticsearch.pid -Des.path.home=/usr/share/elasticsearch -cp :/usr/share/elasticsearch/lib/elasticsearch-0.90.0.jar:/usr/share/elasticsearch/lib/:/usr/share/elasticsearch/lib/sigar/ -Des.default.config=/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml -Des.default.path.home=/usr/share/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.logs=/var/log/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.data=/var/lib/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.work=/tmp/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.conf=/etc/elasticsearch org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.ElasticSearch

calpaterson · on May 20, 2013

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but environment variables and arguments are different things. Environment variables avoid exactly that problem

hackerpants · on May 19, 2013

Yes! I don't want to know anybody's secrets. I won't be publishing the raw data for this reason, in case anything like this gets through by accident.

sdqali · on May 19, 2013

I did history | grep -v "=" | .... to ensure that commands where I specified environment variables are ignored.