How do you prevent your developers from accessing the production database? Use the same mechanism to prevent them from knowing the production HMAC secret. If

How do you prevent your developers from accessing the production database? Use the same mechanism to prevent them from knowing the production HMAC secret. If the production DB credentials are hard-coded, developers would indeed have access to the prod DB; if the production HMAC secret were hard-coded, developers would indeed be able to forge tokens. So don't do that. That's why we use environment variables.