Two main formats to support, in order of priority:

1. .env - simple key/value pairs (trivially safe)
2. .envrc - scripts as defined by https://direnv.net/ – naive handling would be risky, running arbitrary code in a directory. have to consider security threat model.

An enviornment file should be loaded prior to any process start, etc. The workspace configuration screen should have some UI for inspecting/editing these files too.

If an environment file changes (or some other way to detect env changes?), that should invalidate the spec for anything that depends on the environment (when we have a dependency system, at least). That is, we might want to cause an update or even a destroy/recreate for some component.

docker-compose supports an --env-file cli command. we should consider when/how env impacts individual commands, profiles, etc.

Also consider secrets.