Feature Request: Output shell script to set environment variables about chamber

[nickatsegment]

@jradtilbrook Yep, looks good enough to me. Actually, it's so small, you should just copy-paste the code I'd say. Let's not get left-padded here :)

(BTW, https://github.com/alessio/shellescape/blob/master/escargs/escargs.go really should have been called "escargo" :P)

[jradtilbrook]

This sounds like quite a useful addition. I'd be willing to give it a go if no one else has elected to do it and/or you need some help. Let me know

[alessio]

@nickatsegment proposal accepted - I'll rename the tool shortly :)

[otterley]

Hi! Can you tell us about your use case?

It's not possible for a child process to manipulate the environment of its caller, so what you're asking for isn't technically possible. Specifically, chamber is a child process of the shell from which you're invoking it -- once chamber exits, any environment variables it sets disappear along with it.

There are a few workarounds possible.

One is to make chamber have a mode that emits a shell script that can then be evaluated by the invoking shell. You'd then capture the environment variables by invoking it like eval "$(chamber export)".

The other option, which you can use without any modifications to Chamber, is to run something like exec chamber exec ... /bin/bash. This substitutes the current shell process with one that has been populated with the environment variables from Parameter Store.

[omerxx]

@otterley Hi, my use case is populating secrets to an environment that runs locally.
I thought about something like your second option with eval "$(chamber export)"
If you think that this is not a good use then you can drop it...

Anyway, chamber is truly awesome. our production is using it completely now and I've written a blog post about it - https://medium.com/prodopsio/managing-application-secrets-on-aws-with-ssm-and-chamber-3615d08cc599

Kudos!

[otterley]

I've updated the title to better describe your request. Specifically, something like a chamber env that prints a shell script that can be eval'ed by the caller.

[nickatsegment]

@jradtilbrook Go for it!

One thing you'd have to watch out for is safe shell quoting. That's non-trivial code; maybe there's a library out there to do it for us

[jradtilbrook]

Sounds good. I've found this pretty simple library, https://github.com/alessio/shellescape. Are you happy for me to use that?