Interesting: I went into reading this thinking in the context of programs. However, reading the replies here has made me realize it wasn't constrained to just

Interesting: I went into reading this thinking in the context of programs. However, reading the replies here has made me realize it wasn't constrained to just that. For programs, there are better alternatives, especially if you're using a deployment pipeline that has things like key-value stores. In general, environment variables are great, especially for things that have access, practically, to not much else, like shells.