I'm really shocked by the confidence people have here with clearly zero knowledge.

".env_example" is literally just the example/template which is only updated if new "config" items are needed and it doesn't contain actual secrets.

Developers copy ".env"/prod and ".env_local" files, which are used for the specific environments. These are in .gitignore so that they're not accidentally pushed to .git.

For production the ".env" is generated during deployment from secrets in a locked up environment. (I mean they COULD fuck this up, but there's no evidence of this AFAIK)

The example postgres password is simply a "hello world" type password that is often used when running a local docker image of the DB so you can get a full dev environment running in a couple minutes, as mentioned in the readme.md: https://github.com/gsa-tts-archived/ai-gov-api

It's not even a testing environment, it's a temporary local/dev DB just so you can test your code.

I am NOT defending this project, but holy shit this thread is full of misinformation and I had to correct this.