Rails 5 Generate Secret_key_base

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Microsoft office standard 2013 product key generator. Rails provides rake secret for just this purpose. The source code is here. The code simply requires SecureRandom and spits out a string. If you want to be really clever, you can pipe the string directly into your Vim buffer for the config file, with.! Check out rake -T secret inside. Encrypted secrets were first introduced in Rails 5.1. Rails store secrets in config/credentials.yml.enc by default. For applications created prior to Rails 5.2, we’ll automatically generate a new. Rails 5.1.x and 5.2.x: Single file for all environments. This was the main problem. One single file with all credentials and one single key for them. RandomKeygen is a free mobile-friendly tool that offers randomly generated keys and passwords you can use to secure any application, service or device. KEY RandomKeygen - The Secure Password & Keygen Generator. Dec 22, 2017 Rails 5.1 introduced Encrypted Secrets to help simplify the management of your application secrets (things such as service credentials and the secretkeybase). This article details the feature and its usage. Why Encrypted Secrets? Since Rails 4.1, the framework has given you the ability to centrally store secrets in the config/secrets.yml file.

This cookie-based session store is the Rails default. It is dramatically faster than the alternatives.

Sessions typically contain at most a user_id and flash message; both fit within the 4K cookie size limit. A CookieOverflow exception is raised if you attempt to store more than 4K of data.

The cookie jar used for storage is automatically configured to be the best possible option given your application's configuration.

Your cookies will be encrypted using your apps secret_key_base. This goes a step further than signed cookies in that encrypted cookies cannot be altered or read by users. This is the default starting in Rails 4.

Configure your session store in an initializer:

In the development and test environments your application's secret key base is generated by Rails and stored in a temporary file in tmp/development_secret.txt. In all other environments, it is stored encrypted in the config/credentials.yml.enc file.

If your application was not updated to Rails 5.2 defaults, the secret_key_base will be found in the old config/secrets.yml file.

Note that changing your secret_key_base will invalidate all existing session. Additionally, you should take care to make sure you are not relying on the ability to decode signed cookies generated by your app in external applications or JavaScript before changing it.

Because CookieStore extends Rack::Session::Abstract::Persisted, many of the options described there can be used to customize the session cookie that is generated. For example:

would set the session cookie to expire automatically 14 days after creation. Other useful options include :key, :secure and :httponly.

  • CLASSActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore::SessionId
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Source: show on GitHub

Article Categories:#Code,#Back-end Engineering

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Keeping your credentials safe as a developer is extremely important. You don’t want to commit any sensitive information, like passwords or API keys, to your remote git repository as it can allow malicious users to access the services you are using.

The Good Ol’ Days

Since version 4.1, Rails has helped developers store their secrets by generating a new secrets.yml file in the config folder. By default, this file contains a SECRET_KEY_BASE that is used to “derive keys for encrypted cookies… [and] HMAC signed cookies.”[1] However, you could add additional keys to this file:

Once everything is saved, you could access it via Rails.application.secrets.secret_api_key. This way, you could store your secret credentials in a single file and simply make sure that secrets.yml is part of your .gitignore.

The release of Rails 5.1 added another file named secrets.yml.enc to allow for encrypting your secret credentials, but this caused some confusion. The combination of config/secrets.yml, config/secrets.yml.enc, and SECRET_KEY_BASE made it so it wasn’t clear where secrets should be stored and what the relevance of SECRET_KEY_BASE was [2] .

A New Beginning

With this confusion in mind, Rails released version 5.2 and created an entirely new way to store your secret credentials that I will walk you through.

First, make sure you install the newest version of Rails by running:

This ensures that the Rails Gem you install is the most up to date (you can find the most recent release of Rails on the official RubyGems page[3]). After doing so, when you create a new Rails project, you should see two files in your config folder:

  • credentials.yml.enc is an encrypted file that will contain all your secret credentials. Your private API keys and passwords will all be stored in this file, all encrypted. Since this file is encrypted, it is safe to push this to a remote git repository or a server.
  • master.key is a file containing your encryption key. Without this file or if it is modified, Rails will not be able to read your credentials stored in credentials.yml.enc. This file should NOT be pushed to a git repo or any server as it can be used to decrypt credentials.yml.enc and someone can steal sensitive information.

You must be wondering, how do I add my secret credentials to credentials.yml.enc if it is encrypted? Well, you need to go into your command line interface and run:

Without the --wait flag, your credentials.yml.enc will be saved immediately without giving you the chance to edit. Also, you can replace “subl” with the command line shortcut to whatever your favorite text-editor is (in this case, the command above will open credentials.yml.enc in Sublime since I’ve made the shortcut available). Now, you can edit and store new credentials in YAML format, save the file, and Rails will automatically re-encrypt credentials.yml.enc for you. You can access these secret credentials at any point in your application by using:

Rails Generate Secret

And you’re good to go! If you do not want to redefine your EDITOR everytime you want to edit your credentials, simply add to your shell profile:

Now, all you need to do to edit your credentials is run:

Rails Generate Model Example

Heroku and other Deployment Strategies

If you’re deploying your app to Heroku, the encryption key from master.key is stored in an entirely different way. Heroku allows you to add special configuration variables in the Settings tab of your app’s dashboard. There, you can add a new config variable called RAILS_MASTER_KEY and paste the encryption key into the space provided. Once saved, the Rails application is smart enough to detect that the master key is stored as a config variable to decrypt your secret credentials.

The underlying technology of this method is that Heroku is setting an environment variable that Rails can access via ENV[“RAILS_MASTER_KEY”]. Therefore, to store your master key on other remote servers, you just have to save the encryption key as an environment variable.

Collaboration

What if you need to share your master.key with other developers working on your team or project? Simply sending a message containing the special key over spaces like Slack isn’t safe and ultimately isn’t good practice. That’s why password management is a giant field of its own and there are a multitude of ways to securely share your credentials with trusted people. Two services I personally use are 1Password and OneTimeSecret.

1Password is a secure password manager that allows users to store any kind of credentials: passwords, API keys, software licenses, etc. Generate pem file from key file. In fact, 1Password allows organizations to get in on it so team members can securely share a pool of sensitive information amongst everyone on their team.

OneTimeSecret is more for quickly sharing credentials with your team and less for long-term storage like 1Password. You can generate a secret link, password-protected or not, that will contain the sensitive information once opened. However, there’s a catch! Once you open the link for the first time, you should store the given information somewhere more secure as you cannot open the link ever again. Also, the secret-holder can set an expiry time on the link so you have a certain timeframe to retrieve the secret information and store it in another location.

Now, you know how to safely store credentials and reduce the risk of unauthorized access!

References:

Rails Generate Model

  • [1]: https://medium.com/@michaeljcoyne/understanding-the-secret-key-base-in-ruby-on-rails-ce2f6f9968a1
  • [2]: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/30006
  • [3]: https://rubygems.org/gems/rails