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How to use 1Password for Secrets in ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

· 2 min read
Update

A new blog post has been written about this topic! Check out How to use 1Password for Secrets in ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc (UPDATE).

1Password is a password manager. Over the years, I have tried LastPass, BitWarden, and 1Password. Out of the three, 1Password has been my favourite. The Mac app, browser extension, and IOS app are well-polished. One of my favourite parts about 1Password is the ability to access passwords using the 1Password CLI.

Using op inject for secrets​

I recently discovered a pattern to use the 1Password CLI to store all of my secrets in my dotfiles:

# ~/.zshrc
op  inject --in-file "${HOME}/.dotfiles/secrets.zsh" | while read -r line; do
  eval "$line"
done
# ~/.dotfiles/secrets.zsh
export NOTION_API_KEY="op://private/notion.so/api-token"
export TEST_PYPI_TOKEN="op://private/test.pypi.org/token"

Before the 1Password CLI, I used this pattern:

# ~/.zshrc
source "${HOME}/.dotfiles/secrets.zsh"
# ~/.dotfiles/secrets.zsh
export NOTION_API_KEY="XXXXX"
export TEST_PYPI_TOKEN="YYYYY"

There are a few downsides to this old approach:

  • I must be careful with ~/.dotfiles/secrets.zsh. It contains my real secrets!
  • If I accidentally check it into git, that would be bad.
  • If I lose the file, that would also suck. I would need to recreate all of my tokens.
  • To use the secrets on other computers, I need to copy and paste the values.

Now, with 1Password, I can use 1Password as my source of truth for all of my API keys. If they change, I only need to update them in one place.

The only downside to my new approach is that I am now prompted to authenticate every time I start a new terminal session. But thanks to my MacBook's built-in touch ID, this is not too cumbersome.

Other methods​

It took me a few iterations to get to my current approach. At first, I tried using op read:

export NOTION_API_KEY=$(op read "op://private/notion.so/api-token)

This worked but was much slower. In my actual secrets file, I have about 40 items. Running op read 40 times could take 5-10 seconds.

Using op inject gets around this by only running the op CLI once. The ~/.dotfiles/secrets.zsh also looks cleaner this way. The downside is that the ~/.zshrc file becomes more complicated with the eval loop.