I’ve started to use livebooks as living documentation of the progress of my projects. E.g. if I need to explore an API to create a tool that monitors it, I’ll start with a livebook to explore the examples. I find this much more long-lived than using an API exploration tool like Postman.

I instantly hit the issue of configuration, wanted to use standard .env files for secrets, private keys etc. I couldn’t find any solutions to this, so I modified the dotenv library and release livebook_env - a little utility for important .env files inside livebooks.

Use it like this:

Mix.install([
  {:livebook_env, "~> 1.0"}
])

LivebookEnv.import_dotenv("/path/to/your/project/.env")

Obviously this is geared towards local development, and teams of people who also share .env files. It’s not intended to be a replacement for live online collaboration around secrets.