Secrets Credentials

Credentials Essentials Guide

You can create encoded file with

jets credentials:edit

This opens up an editor where you can add secrets to a YAML structured file. Example:

secret_key_base: c87a343EXAMPLE
foo: bar

Once you save and close the file, it creates an encoded file

config/credentials.yml.enc

You can confirm that the file was saved and see the unencrypted contents with:

$ jets credentials:show | yq
secret_key_base: secret_key_base: c87a343EXAMPLE
foo: bar

To use or reference the value of the credential:

Jets.application.credentials.foo

You’ll see that the credential will load differently for JETS_ENV=production and JETS_ENV=development.

Cheatsheet Commands Summary

jets credentials:help
jets credentials:show
jets credentials:edit

Editor Wait

If you’re using an editor like VSCode, you’ll need to tell the credentials command to wait for the editor to close the file before returning to the process and encoding the results. Here’s how you do that.

EDITOR="code --wait" jets credentials:edit

Production vs Development Credentials

To set the credentials for production you can use the -e production option. Example:

jets credentials:edit -e production
jets credentials:show -e production

Note, using JETS_ENV=production does not work to set the credentials since the “environment” can be nil. Here are the files relevant files to help understand:

config/credentials.yml.enc
config/master.key

And the environment based files:

config/credentials/development.key
config/credentials/development.yml.enc
config/credentials/production.key
config/credentials/production.yml.enc

On AWS Lambda

When the code is running on AWS Lambda, the *.key files like config/master.key will not be deployed. This is because jets credentials:edit automatically adds config/master.key to .gitignore and jets will not deploy files in .gitignore. Without the master key, the Jets.application.credentials.foo call will not be able to return the secret value.

Note, it is not recommended to remove it from the .gitignore file because you might accidentally commit it to version control. Instead, you can add the key value to the a Env File. Example:

Here’s the value from the master.key.

$ cat config/master.key
0254c916db6e005dbc9dd8c11EXAMPLE

.env

JETS_MASTER_KEY=0254c916db6e005dbc9dd8c11EXAMPLE

Getting Started