Clarification on Environment variables

[andyj]

Thanks for the clarification, makes perfect sense.

I tried to run

flyctl secrets import

But it would just get stuck with no output and I couldn’t exit out of the terminal

I found this

Managing fly apps and dependencies as "infrastructure as code"

Hello, another user here with similar thoughts. I solve parts of the abstraction layer you’re asking about through CI (github actions); for instance, iterate through secrets and pass them to flyctl - or knowing which file to use for what environment, or releasing ip’s as part of an initial setup. Making this more robust is probably best achieved by using their graphql endpoint to interface with; but I haven’t gotten to that point yet. It would be interesting to collaborate on a github actions …

So I used this command and it worked fine

cat .env | fly secrets import

Could you clarify why does the above work and not the normal secrets import command, what does cat .env do?