Rails 4.1 secrets.yml on Heroku

uzzer · May 14, 2014, 8:40pm

Continuing the discussion from How do you handle secret credentials in Ruby On Rails?:

How do you handle secret credentials in Ruby On Rails?

If you’re using Rails 4.1, you can store these items in environment variables and then reference them in secrets.yml.

In any other version of Rails (this also works in 4.1), the best way to do it is to have the credentials stored in a .env file, and then have the dotenv and dotenv-rails gems in your development and test environments. Those gems load the configured variables in your local file just for your application, which is great if you hack on more than one app. Environment variables can be useful for other parts of your configuration that aren’t passwords as well.

Heroku has a great config part of the toolbelt for pushing up and pulling down environment variables.

The most important part of whatever solution you use here is to NEVER CHECK THE ACTUAL PASSWORDS IN TO VERSION CONTROL. Your git history should never contain passwords or other sensitive credentials. If you accidentally do check passwords or other credentials into git, if you do a little Googling you can find instructions for how to comb through your history and remove the passwords. The procedure does completely rewrite your commit history in the process, so any collaborators of yours will have to force-pull to get their repositories back in sync.

I did try to use default secrets.yml with rails 4.1 on heroku and stuck, because now I have to use ENV variables only, commit secrets.yml to repo and have ENV solution like figaro. Such a smell like I am cooking it wrong.

btw, that is all based on suspenders template which does not instantly works well on Rails 4.1 anymore.

lenart · May 15, 2014, 6:39am

I had the same problem - rails secrets full of heroku ENVs and, without much thinking, switched back to using dotenv which makes it easier to dump/import env variables when using heroku. I’d be happy to hear how others approach this.

uzzer · May 15, 2014, 4:37pm

seems like we have to wait with using secrets.yml in full power

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Rails 4.1 secrets.yml on Heroku

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