I have many services written in Node and loading secrets on startup has always been a problem for me.

I believe that when a service starts up, it should have every piece of configuration/secret ready for it beforehand.

• Static configurations are easy (environment variables, usually via .env file).
• Secrets? More complex if the infra hosting you doesn't support that.

Luckily, I've found that in Node, whatever script we add to the package.json file can have pre and/or post scripts as well. So it comes in very handy, as I can:

1. have a reusable code that loaded secrets from somewhere
2. persists the values in the environment variables
3. before starting up the main script

The difficulty is that I'm unable to persist environment variables and have them available on the next process.

I wonder if that's a limitation (in Linux) or there's some way that I have missed.

Writing the secrets to a file to be read by the main process is unacceptable.