Being able to open source code without compromising any credentials is a great goal, but using environment variables doesn't really accomplish it UNLESS your code only runs on a PaaS, which will always supply all of your app's env vars, but it's unrealistic for a number of reasons.
First, there'll be extra vars that your PaaS won't fully manage, so you'll have to keep track of them yourself and then later configure the PaaS environment, so your app can access them. Second, for non-PaaS applications/deployments you still need to manage the environment variables.
The variables don't magically appear by themselves :-) They need to be stored somewhere... This "somewhere" is likely to be the git repo (for the app), so you are back to square one on this.
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Being able to open source code without compromising any credentials is a great goal, but using environment variables doesn't really accomplish it UNLESS your code only runs on a PaaS, which will always supply all of your app's env vars, but it's unrealistic for a number of reasons.
First, there'll be extra vars that your PaaS won't fully manage, so you'll have to keep track of them yourself and then later configure the PaaS environment, so your app can access them. Second, for non-PaaS applications/deployments you still need to manage the environment variables.
The variables don't magically appear by themselves :-) They need to be stored somewhere... This "somewhere" is likely to be the git repo (for the app), so you are back to square one on this.