Mise integration with Fnox

[guyguy333]

Hi 👋

I’m using Mise together with Fnox to manage environment variables and secrets.

Fnox works great for loading secrets as environment variables when entering a directory. However, I have a use case where the source of a secret differs between developers:
• Each developer stores a personal token in their own secret manager (1Password, Bitwarden, etc.)
• The path / reference to the secret is different per user
• What matters for the project is only that a specific env var (e.g. MY_TOKEN) is available, not where it comes from

Because of this, I cannot commit fnox.toml to the repository, as it is inherently user-specific. That part is fine.

To document and enforce the requirement, I tried declaring the variable in mise.toml:

[env]
MY_TOKEN = { required = true }

The idea is:
• Make it explicit to developers that MY_TOKEN is required
• Allow each developer to decide how it is provided (Fnox, secret manager, shell, etc.)

Problem

Mise evaluates environment variables before Fnox loads them.
As a result:
• Mise fails early because MY_TOKEN is missing
• Even though Fnox would correctly inject it afterward

This creates a chicken-and-egg problem and makes it unclear how Fnox is supposed to integrate cleanly with Mise, despite being the recommended approach.

Questions
• Is there a recommended pattern to declare required env vars in Mise while letting Fnox provide them dynamically?
• Is there a way for Mise to defer or relax env validation until after Fnox runs?
• Or should required secrets not be declared in mise.toml at all in this scenario?

Any guidance or best practices would be very helpful.

Thanks! 🙏