JJex

Quick Start

This guide walks you through the developer workflow after your team has deployed Jex. If you do not have an API URL yet, start with Self-Host First.

1. Install the CLI

npm install -g jex-secrets

2. Log in

jex login --api-url https://jex.yourcompany.com

This opens your browser to your team’s Jex login page. After authenticating, a token is saved to ~/.jex/token with 0600 permissions. You only need to do this once per machine.

3. Initialize your project

Run this from the root of your project directory:

jex init

You’ll be shown a list of your Jex projects and environments to choose from. This creates a .envault file in the current directory:

project    = "my-app-id"
defaultEnv = "dev"
apiURL     = "https://jex.yourcompany.com"

The .envault file contains no secrets — only a project reference and default environment. Commit it to version control.

4. Add secrets

You can add secrets from the dashboard or directly via the CLI:

jex secrets set DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@host/mydb
jex secrets set REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379

5. Pull secrets to a local .env

jex secrets pull
# Pulled 2 secrets to .env

This writes an atomic .env file using a temp-file-then-rename strategy. Add .env to your .gitignore.

6. Run your app with secrets injected

The recommended workflow — no .env file written:

jex run -- npm run dev

jex run fetches secrets over HTTPS, injects them into the child process environment, and starts your app. No file is written to disk at any point.

7. Push secrets from an existing .env

If you have an existing .env file you want to migrate to the vault:

jex secrets push
# Pushed 8 secrets (8 created, 0 updated).

Typical workflow

# Morning: pull the latest secrets before starting work
jex secrets pull
 
# Or: use jex run for a no-disk-write workflow
jex run -- npm run dev
 
# When you add a new secret:
jex secrets set MY_NEW_KEY=value
 
# Check what environments your project has:
jex envs
 
# List the secrets in the current environment:
jex secrets list

Next steps

Quick Start · Jex