1 Million Installs: From Experimental to Essential

Eight months ago, dotenvx introduced a new way to think about config management. Today, it’s an essential secrets tool with over 1 million monthly installs (and growing quickly).

That growth didn’t happen by accident—dotenvx development has been heavy with 88 releases in 8 months. That’s a new release every 2.75 days!

Today, it is a world-class tool–handling .env parsing, variable expansion, command substitution, encrypted .env files, and more better than anything else can. Each day, hundreds of software engineers newly learn of, and begin using, dotenvx.

As a result, it’s starting to grow into something bigger—a community, an ecosystem, and a standard.

Community

Dotenvx has grown fast, and a big part of that is developer involvement. In just eight months, engineers have contributed ideas, issues, and pull requests that shaped its direction.

GitHub Activity. More than 250 issues filed, 275 PRs created, and 60,000 lines of code written in the last eight months.
Third-Party Documentation. Users wrote about dotenvx, made videos about dotenvx, recommended dotenvx, and much more.
Adoption and Dependents. Most significantly, major projects adopted dotenvx and became dotenvx dependents.
- NASA
- AWS
- Supabase
- Cloudflare

This kind of community involvement makes dotenvx better. The feedback loop between users and development is tight, and that’s been key to its fast growth.

Ecosystem

Dotenvx isn’t just a CLI—it’s extending into the tools developers use every day.

VS Code Extension. Decrypt your encrypted .env files in VS Code with the Dotenvx VS Code Extension.
Chrome Extension. Decrypt your encrypted .env files directly on GitHub with the Dotenvx Chrome Extension.
Buildpacks. Install dotenvx to Heroku (or any platform that supports buildpacks) with the Dotenvx Buildpack.

This growing ecosystem ensures that no matter where developers work—local editors, browsers, or cloud platforms—dotenvx is increasingly there to seamlessly handle secrets.

Standard

Dotenvx isn’t just widely used—it’s built on a foundation that makes it the right way to handle secrets.

From the whitepaper:

Dotenvx: Reducing Secrets Risk with Cryptographic Separation

Abstract. An ideal secrets solution would not only centralize secrets but also contain the fallout of a breach. While secrets managers offer centralized storage and distribution, their design creates a large blast radius, risking exposure of thousands or even millions of secrets. We propose a solution that reduces the blast radius by splitting secrets management into two distinct components: an encrypted secrets file and a separate decryption key.

This approach—cryptographic separation—ensures that even if one component is compromised, the overall security of secrets remains intact. The whitepaper breaks down the problem and solution, and “it makes a great case for dotenvx.” ¹

By stating the problem well and implementing good DX, dotenvx is emerging as a new standard for secrets management of .env files. It’s pretty incredible.

Conclusion