Secrets

Plexus stores sensitive values in your operating system's keychain rather than in plaintext config, and keeps the credentials Claude Code runs on out of every hook it starts.

Where secrets live

Secrets are written to the native credential store for your platform — never to Plexus's own config, database, or logs.

Write-only by design

Secrets support three operations: set a value, check whether one exists, and delete it. There is deliberately no read-back. Once a secret is stored, the interface can only confirm that a value is present or absent — it can never display, copy, or return it.

This is a security boundary, not a missing feature. Values stay inside the backend and the OS keystore; they never cross into the UI. To change a stored secret, set it again with a new value. To retire one, delete it.

How hooks use secrets

Your hooks run as shell commands, so they read whatever they need from their own environment and from the worktree — including environment files brought in by the Files and folders to copy setting (see Sessions & worktrees).

To protect your credentials, Plexus scrubs its own sensitive environment before spawning any hook child process. The Anthropic credentials Plexus uses to run Claude Code — ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN — are always stripped, even if a hook tries to set them itself. This is automatic and unconditional.

Hooks otherwise inherit a normal environment (your PATH, HOME, and toolchain), so they can run the tools they need without ever seeing your agent credentials.

Related

• Prompt templates — saved prompts follow you between machines; what leaves your computer is shown in full before it does.
• Hooks — what runs, when, and in what order
• Sessions & worktrees — copy gitignored files like .env into each session