The Awesome New 1Password Feature for Developers to Secure and Manage Your Secrets

How 1Password secrets automation will help secure, update & sync your developer secrets

The Problem with Secrets

As a developer, you’ll inevitably work with secrets. Sensitive information such as API Keys, user credentials, and database URLs to name a few. But how to best secure them?

After all, a .env file is just a text file albeit hidden. A hacker with access to the server or development filesystem would be able to read this information and often environment variables are leaked when logging.

The issue with alternatives such as Docker secrets is that they rely on you using a particular tool or piece of software for all your projects. It isn’t cross-platform.

There’s also the challenge of keeping them updated. If you modify your secrets on your development machine or server, then you also need to change this in production. This is particularly prevalent when working in teams. What if you could secure your secrets easily in both development and production as well as share them across your team?

The password manager, 1Password has recently released a great new feature to solve this: 1Password Secrets Automation.

What Is 1Password Secrets Automation?

1Password Secrets Automation refers to 1Password’s method of being able to securely store, sync, and retrieve secrets. There’s a range of different tools, extensions, and plugins behind it that allows you to use secrets wherever you need to such as code editors and cloud servers, etc.

At its core are secret references. A secret reference is the form of data that 1Password stores secrets as. They are made up of three parts: vault, item, and field. Vault refers to the 1Password vault you store your secret in, Item the name of the 1Password entry and field, the name of the field the secret is stored in.

A secret reference looks like this: op://Vault1/Sample API Key/api_key . The secret reference is what will be in your code and 1Password will translate that into your real secret.