Rails Generate New Secret Key Base

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Rails 4.1 generates a new secrets.yml file in the config folder. By default, this file contains the application's secretkeybase, but it could also be used to store other secrets such as access keys for external APIs. The secrets added to this file are accessible via Rails.application.secrets. For example, with the following config/secrets.yml. Apr 28, 2016  An Introduction to Using JWT Authentication in Rails With the advent of Single Page Applications (SPA) and mobile applications, APIs have come to the forefront of web development. Upgrading Ruby on Rails. Use rake secret to generate new keys for the. If you leave your existing secrettoken in place and add the new secretkeybase. Aug 02, 2019  app error: Missing `secretkeybase` for 'production' environment, set this value in `config/secrets.yml` (RuntimeError) - secretkeybase.

Background

Generally in applications there are various secrets and credentials, that we need to make use of like API keys, secrets, etc.For such secrets we need the ability to conveniently and securely manage credentials.

Rails 5.1 added a feature to use secrets to manage credentials.

Rails 5.2 replaced secrets with credentials, since encrypted and un-encrypted secrets were making it harder to manage them.

A set of files were used to manage these credentials:

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

config/credentials.yml.enc is an encrypted file which store the credentials. As this is a encrypted file, we can safely commit it to our version control systems.

config/master.key contains RAILS_MASTER_KEY which is used to decrypt the config/credentials.yml.enc. We should not commit this file to version control.

Interacting with credentials

As config/credentials.yml.enc is encrypted we should never directly read from or write to it. Instead, we will use utilities provided by Rails which abstract encryption and decryption process for us.

How to add/update credentials?

We can edit the credentials by running the following command:

This will open a vim editor with the decrypted version of the credentials file.

We can add new credentials in YAML format. Lets add the following lines, save the changes,
and exit.

When we save it, it encrypts again using the same master key.

If default editor is not set and we haven’t specified the editor, then we get the following message:

How to read credentials?

We can now access the credentials in the following way:

Managing multi environment credentials before Rails 6

There was no built in support for multiple environment credentials before Rails 6. We could manage credentials for different environments but it was upto us to explicitly specify which set of credentials to use for a specific environment.

We could store the credentials in a single file as below:

Then, config can be accessed using the following command:

There are some problems with this approach:

  • There is just 1 master key and everyone on the development team had access to it. Which means everyone on the development team had access to production environment.
  • We needed to explicitly specify which environment credentials to use in the code.

Another way to manage environment specific credentials was by creating environment specific files.For example, we can create config/staging.yml.enc for staging environmentand config/production.yml.enc for production environment.To read config from these files, Rails 5.2 providedencrypted method to support for managing multiple credentials files.

This approach involved writing even more boiler plate code to manage the keys and the encrypted files for every environment.

In Rails 6

Now, Rails 6 has added support for multi environment credentials.

It provides utility to easily create and use environment specific credentials. Each of these have their own encryption keys.

Global Credentials

The changes added in the above PR are backwards compatible. If environment specific credentials are not present then rails will use the global credentials and master key which are represented by following files:

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

We use the global configuration only for development and test environments. We share the config/master.key with our entire team.

Create credentials for production environment

To create credentials for production environment, we can run the following command:

The above command does the following:

  • Creates config/credentials/production.key if missing. Don’t commit this file to VCS.
  • Creates config/credentials/production.yml.enc if missing. Commit this file to VCS.
  • Decrypts and opens the production credentials file in the default editor.

We share the production.key with limited members of our team who have access for production deployment.

Let’s add following credentials and save:

Similarly we can create credentials for different environment like staging.

Using the credentials in Rails

For any environment Rails automatically detects which set of credential to use.Environment specific credentials will take precedence over global credentials. If environment specific credentials are present, they will be used else Rails will default to global credentials.

For development:

For production:

Storing encryption key in environment variables

Rails Generate New Secret Key Base

We can also set the value of the encryption key in specific environment variable Rails will auto detect and use it.

We can either use the generic environment variable RAILS_MASTER_KEY or an environment specific environment variable like RAILS_PRODUCTION_KEY

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If these variable are set then we don’t need to create the *.key files.Rails will auto detect these variables and use them to encrypt/decrypt the credential files.

The environment variable can be used for example on Heroku or similar platforms.

Our love for Rails, Docker and Kubernetes is no secret! In this post, I wanted to share some of our experience on how to deal with Rails 6 assets that use webpacker in Docker in a production environment.

What are we trying to achieve?

By the end of this post, we are going to run a Rails 6 application with compiled assets from inside of a Docker container under Production environment.

What do you need?

A Rails 6 application. You can use this sample app if you want: https://github.com/cloud66-samples/rails6-mysql

Rails Generate New Secret Key Base

NOTE: If you use this example repository, all the files mentioned in this post are already created for you.

You'd also need to have Docker installed on your machine.
Basic understanding of using Docker command line and Dockefile format is also required.

While ultimately we are going to run this on a Kubernetes cluster (or Minikubes), the setup is the same and this post is going to focus on the tips of running Rails 6 in a containerized environment rather than focusing on the details of Kubernetes. For this reason, we're going to use Docker Compose instead of Kubernetes to make things simpler as the Rails settings are the same in both environments.

Let's get started

Running in Dev

First, let's run our application in development mode to make sure everything it runs with no errors and we have the basics configured correctly.

To get going, create a file called Dockerfile in the application root directory like this one:

This installs the latest version of Ruby. If you want to change that, you can do so on the first line of the file. This might be needed if you explicitly have specified a ruby version in your Gemfile. Also here you see I am installing version 2.1.2 of Bundler gem. Feel free to use the version your Gemfile is compatible with (Rails 6 defaults to Bundler 2).

Rails Generate New Secret Key Base Location

Our example app, like many others, uses MySQL as a database. To run both Rails and MySQL in docker on our laptop, we can use Docker Compose. Create a file called, docker-compose.yml in your application root directory like this one:

Please mind that this is only for development purposes and that's why you can see the password in clear text in this file!

To make sure Rails can see the database, we need to make sure our database.yml is configured correctly:

These is one last thing to do before we can run the app: create the database. This is needed only once unless you wipe the MySQL image off your laptop.

Now we can start the app:

Pes 18 cd key generator 2020

On your laptop, visit http://localhost:3000 and you should see the app running.

Running in Production

You might have noticed that like any other Rails app running in development the application compiles the assets upon the first call. In production, we would want this to happen during the image build to speed things up.

Secret Key Skin Care

To make this change, we're going to add the following line to our dockerfile as the last line:

This will run the asset precompilation and adds the compiled assets to the image.

Let's run the application again, this time in production. To run the application in production, change the value of RAILS_ENV to production in your docker-compose.yml.

Visiting http://localhost:3000 you will notice none of the assets are served correctly. This is because Rails by default doesn't serve static assets in production. This is done with the assumption that your web server (nginx, Apache, etc) is going to take care of the static assets before they hit the Rails stack to speed things up.

A note on secrets

A new Rails 6 application, won't run in production environment, unless you configre a secret_key_base for it and use the Rails 6's Master key. This can be done by doing the following:

  1. Generate a new secret by running rake secret copy the output
  2. Run rails credentials:edit --environment production and enter the value from step 1 as the value of the secret_key_base key in the file.
  3. Make sure RAILS_MASTER_KEY is passed in as a variable to your container. This is used by Rails to decrypt production.yml.enc file.

Once you close the editor, the content of the file will be encrypted and written to production.yml.enc under config/credentials. Rails also adds production.key to your .gitignore file to avoid leaking secrets into your git repo. You also need to make sure master.key is not commited into your git repo either, agian, by adding it to .gitignore file.

Subnote on VS Code and Rails Credentials Editor

If you're using Visual Studio Code (or similar editors like Sublime or Atom) as your default editor, you might need to set the value of EDITOR environment variable to make sure the secrets editor still works:

In case of VS Code, -w ensures the editor process stays up until the file is closed so it can be encrypted and written back to the disk.

Serving Static Assets in Production in Kubernetes

In a containerized environment, it is possible to run nginx in front of your Rails application and share a volume between the 2 containers (Rails and nginx) with changes in the nginx configuration to serve the static assets using nginx and not Rails. However, when running in a real production environment (as opposed to only setting RAILS_ENV to production on our laptop), if you're running your application on Kubernetes, you're also probably running it behind an Ingress Controller, which most probably means your nginx is shared between multiple applications. This means we need to make Rails serve static assets itself.

To make that change set RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES to true in your docker-compose.yml and run the application again:

This time, running docker-compose up will start Rails and serves the static assets.

Rails Generate New Secret Key Base Location

Where are my logs?

Rails Generate Secret_key_base For Production

Rails by default logs to log files in production. In a containerized environment, you'd want to make sure logs are written to stdout and stderr instead so they can be collected by your orchestrator (like Kubernetes or in this example, Compose). To make that change, set RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT to true in your docker-compose.yml file:

Now you should see your logs!

Summary

Secret Key Indonesia

In summary, to run Rails 6 in production in a containerized environment like Kubernetes, you need to do the following:

  1. Make sure yarn is installed in your Docker image (see the Dockerfile example above)
  2. Install Bundler 2 and above. Most Docker Ruby base images come with Bundler 1.
  3. Run yarn install --check-files in your Dockerfile
  4. Run RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile in your Dockerfile.
  5. Set RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES to true
  6. Set RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT to true if you would like to see the logs.
  7. Make sure you either have a credentials file in production or set the SECRET_KEY_BASE variable in production and during the image build phase.

Can it be made simpler?

If this looks too much, you can always use Cloud 66 Skycap to run your Rails applications on any Kubernetes cluster. Skycap understands Rails: it connects to your git and generates the needed Dockerfile, environment variables and all of the needed Kuberentes configuration files you'd to run your Rails app in production on Kubernetes in a simple few steps.

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