rethink how configuration is stored and pushed to servers

[rahulbot]

The current approach creates high friction when we have multiple deploy environments:

• you have maintain to have a local checkout and/or branch for each server
• pulling in from master to your deploy branch/checkout is annoying
• double-checking to make sure you aren't pushing config to the wrong server/github is stressful and risky

I suggest switching to a file-or-env approach like python-dotenv. This would let you have all the config set up as environment variables in the container, and each person would maintain their own local config file that is loaded into env when you run your local server.