Story3 min read
Why I built Nionx Cloud
I kept leaking .env files and never really understood how they connect to my code. So I built the tool I needed.
By Benjamin Juhasz (@nionx)
Hi, I'm Benjamin Juhasz. Online I go by nionx, or nionx101 on GitHub. I build Nionx Cloud on my own, and this is why.
A bit about me
I was born in Hungary and I live in Sweden. I graduated from Grillska Gymnasiet in network technology, and took extra programming courses on top of that. On the side I'm a hobby UI and UX designer, which is why I care a lot about how a tool looks and feels, and why the dashboard is quiet and monochrome.
Before Nionx, I was a Roblox developer writing Luau. One of my projects there was FrameworkPlus, a security-first framework for protecting and validating Roblox systems. I've also built a Discord status for Apple Music in Rust, a Minecraft crafting plugin, a Tetris game and a VS Code icon theme. They're all on my GitHub.
The problem was me
I'll be honest: I kept making mistakes with .env files. I leaked them by putting them in the wrong place. And for a long time I didn't really understand how a .env file and my code actually connect. It just worked, until it didn't.
I don't think I'm the only one. A secret in a plain text file is one wrong commit, one shared folder or one pasted screenshot away from being public. Now AI coding agents read every file in a project too, .env included.
So I built the tool I needed
Nionx Cloud keeps secrets out of files altogether:
- Secrets live in one place, encrypted before they're saved. The dashboard never shows a value again, not even to you.
- Your app reads the secrets for one environment when it starts, with a read-only token that expires.
- An AI agent only needs the names of the secrets a project uses. You type the values yourself; the agent never sees them.
If you want the details, I wrote about how secrets are encrypted and how API tokens work.
One person, and honest about it
Nionx Cloud is in a closed beta. It's free, and for now it's for testing, not for real projects or production secrets. Next on my list is moving encryption keys to a managed key service (AWS KMS) and connecting AI tools like Claude Code directly.
I'd rather tell you what's finished and what isn't than pretend to be a big company. If you have questions or ideas, find me on GitHub.
Benji
