The Secrets Vault
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Login SubscribeHow do does deployment work with environment variables? Because, in a real app, we're going to have a bunch of sensitive environment variables - like database username & password, API keys and more.
Deployment 101
I don't want to get too far into the topic of deployment right now, but here's the general idea. Step 1: get your code onto your production machine and run composer install to populate the vendor/ directory. Step 2, somehow create a .env.local file with all your production values. And step 3, run:
php bin/console cache:clear
to clear the production cache. The Symfony documentation has more details, but... it's basically that simple.
The trickiest part is step 2: creating the .env.local file. Somehow, your deployment system needs to have access to the sensitive environment variable values so it can populate this file. But, since we're not committing those to our repository... where should we store them?
Hello Secrets Vaults
To solve this problem, a concept called a "Secrets Vault" has been invented. And there are actually several cloud-based vaults where you can store your secrets in their system, then securely read them while you're deploying. Those are excellent options.
Symfony also comes with its own secrets vault, which is super cool because it allows us to commit our sensitive values - called secrets - into Git!
Dumping the Sentry Connection Details
To help us see this, in QuestionController::show(), add a third argument: HubInterface $sentryHub. Below, dump($sentryHub):
Tip
In newer versions of SentryBundle, you may need to dump($sentryHub->getClient())
to see the data that we see here.
| // ... lines 1 - 6 | |
| use Sentry\State\HubInterface; | |
| // ... lines 8 - 12 | |
| class QuestionController extends AbstractController | |
| { | |
| // ... lines 15 - 42 | |
| public function show($slug, MarkdownHelper $markdownHelper, HubInterface $sentryHub) | |
| { | |
| dump($sentryHub); | |
| // ... lines 46 - 64 | |
| } | |
| } |
The main purpose of SentryBundle's services is not for us to interact with them directly like this. But this will be a handy way to quickly see our SENTRY_DSN value. By the way, I found this interface, of course, by using debug:autowiring.
Check it out: back on your browser, I'll close the sentry.io tab and refresh. Down on the web debug toolbar, it dumps a Hub object. If you expand the stack property... and expand again, again, and again, there it is! By digging, we can see that our production SENTRY_DSN value is being used.
Creating the Vault
Here's the goal: we're going to move the SENTRY_DSN environment value into our vault. A vault is basically a collection of encrypted values. And in Symfony, you'll have two vaults: one for the dev environment - which will contain non-sensitive default values - and a separate one for the prod environment with the real values.
So, each "secret" will need to be set in both vaults. Let's start by putting SENTRY_DSN into the dev vault. How do we do that? Find your terminal and run a shiny new command:
php bin/console secrets:set SENTRY_DSN
Because we're in the dev environment, this will populate the dev vault. And, a good value in dev is actually an empty string. If SENTRY_DSN is empty, Sentry is disabled.
So, just hit "Enter". Ah!
Warning: No value provided, aborting.
This is a bug in Symfony where it doesn't allow an empty secret. It's already been fixed and an empty value is allowed in Symfony 5.0.8. So hopefully, you won't get this.
If you do, we can work around it: re-run the command with a - on the end, which tells Symfony to read from STDIN.
php bin/console secrets:set SENTRY_DSN -
Then, as crazy as it sounds, hit Control+D - as in "dog". That was just a fancy way to set SENTRY_DSN to an empty string.
The config/secrets/ Public And Private Key Files
Because this was the first secret that we set into the dev vault, it automatically initialized the vault. It says:
Sodium keys have been generated at
config/secrets/dev/
Let's go check that out! Open up the new config/secrets/ directory. Excellent: this has a dev/ sub-directory because we just created the dev vault.
The dev.encrypt.public.php file returns the key that's used to add or update secrets:
| // ... lines 1 - 2 | |
| return "\xE2\xDBrR\x9Fz\xC7\xED\x2B\x23\x0F\xB0\x14\x00\xD2d\xC0N\x3AU\xD3M\xC5\xA8\x012\x80\xA2\xA2\xEBFq"; |
It's used to encrypt secrets. The dev.decrypt.private.php file does the opposite: its value is used to decrypt the secrets so that our app can read them:
| // ... lines 1 - 2 | |
| return "\x86\xB75m\xEFM\x11\x04\x15\xFB\x03\xC8\xF5\xA2b9\xF0eU\xFF\xEA\xD5\x0F\x06\xAC\x05\x89\xC8\x08\x7F\x8A\x9E\xE2\xDBrR\x9Fz\xC7\xED\x2B\x23\x0F\xB0\x14\x00\xD2d\xC0N\x3AU\xD3M\xC5\xA8\x012\x80\xA2\xA2\xEBFq"; |
The decrypt key is usually a sensitive value that we would not commit to the repository. However, we usually do commit the decrypt key for the dev vault for two reasons. First, the values in the dev vault are hopefully not very sensitive. And second, we do want other developers on our team to be able to decrypt the dev secrets locally. Otherwise... their code won't work.
This directory will also contain one file per secret. We will commit this because it's encrypted.
Creating the prod Vault
Let's repeat the same process to put SENTRY_DSN into the prod vault. Run the command again but also pass --env=prod:
php bin/console secrets:set SENTRY_DSN --env=prod
For the value, open .env.local, copy the long DSN string, then paste here. You won't see the value because the command is hiding it for security purposes.
And... boom! This generated the prod vault and encrypted the secret. Check out config/secrets/prod. It has the same files, but the output had one extra, angry looking note:
DO NOT COMMIT THE DECRYPTION KEY FOR THE PROD ENVIRONMENT
It's talking about prod.decrypt.private.php. This file does need to be here in order for our app to decrypt & read the prod secrets. But we are not going to commit it. This is the one sensitive value that your deploy script will need to know about.
Tip
Instead of creating the prod.decrypt.private.php file when deploying, you can
also set the key on a SYMFONY_DECRYPTION_SECRET environment variable. See
Production Secrets
for more info.
And notice how this is a different color in my editor? That's because... in our .gitignore file, we are already ignoring the prod.decrypt.private.php file:
| // ... line 1 | |
| ###> symfony/framework-bundle ### | |
| // ... lines 3 - 5 | |
| /config/secrets/prod/prod.decrypt.private.php | |
| // ... lines 7 - 9 | |
| ### | |
| // ... lines 11 - 18 |
Committing the Secrets Vaults
Cool! Let's commit them! At your terminal... run:
git add config/secrets
And then:
git status
Yes! This added the encrypted secret values themselves, both the encrypt and decrypt keys for the dev environment, but only the encrypt key for prod. Other developers will be able to add new keys for prod, but not read them. Isn't encryption cool?
Now that our vaults are set up, let's use these secret values in our app! Doing that will be easier than you think. Let's tackle it next.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this concept of secrets vault. So in production, there is one file which is not committed but needs to be deployed, but it allows also to read all the sensitive values. Isn't it exactly what
.env.localdoes? Can someone clarify the conceptual difference here?