This is a simple Go program that finds the first firstup.env file starting from the current directory walking upward, stopping before the root folder (meaning: any /firstup.env file will not be read).

It will write the env vars as export statements. It will also store the list of keys set in a separate environment variable and unset those next time firstupdotenv is run.

The output may then look like this:

unset FOO
unset BAR
export FIRSTUPDOTENV_CURRENT_SET_ENV='FOO,BAR'
export FOO='value1'
export BAR='value2'

Note the use of single quotes above to prevent any unlikely security issues with command substitution, word splitting and glob expansion. But this means that environment values with single quotes in them will not work correctly.

The .env format is a file on the form key=value. It ignores empty lines and lines starting with # and lines without an equals sign. If the same key is defined more than once, the last will win.

You can load environment variables from 1Password by adding a line starting with op://:

# Regular variables
FOO=bar

# Load from 1Password
op://Dev/myproject/env

The referenced 1Password field should contain line-separated KEY=value entries:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY=xxx
AWS_SECRET_KEY=yyy

This executes a single op read command, which is useful since op can be slow (~1 second per invocation). All keys loaded from 1Password are tracked and will be unset when you navigate away.

To install:

go install github.com/bep/firstupdotenv@latest

This tool is meant to be used in combination with some shell extension that triggers when you cd into a directory. If you use the Z shell, putting this in your .zshrc will work:

autoload -U add-zsh-hook

firstupdotenv_after_cd() {
	source <(firstupdotenv)
}

add-zsh-hook chpwd firstupdotenv_after_cd