Where to store an encryption key to be used throughout application (Ruby On Rails)

I need to store an encryption key that is going to be accessed through the application globally. Is there a storage place for settings and configs? I tried searching b开发者_运维知识库ut couldn't come up with anything.

---

There's several ways to do something like this.

The simplest way to make something like that globally available to your app is to define a constant within config/environment.rb (or config/environments/production.rb.

However, with sensitive data it's important that they're decoupled from your primary SCM and only available within the production environment - at least this way, if your code is compromised, your encryption key is safe.

There's a couple of methods of doing this that I know of - one would be to set they key in an environment variable, which can then be accessed in Ruby through ENV['variable_name].

Another option is to store it in an external file that's de-coupled from your code repository, then have that read in with an initializer.

Whichever way you do it, you can combine this approach with a constant declaration in config/environment.rb:

# config/environment.rb
ENCRYPTION_KEY = ENV['encryption_key']

This way, should you change the storage location of your key, you only need to change one line of code.

---

You can set all your secret constants in a config/initializers/01_secrets.rb file. Here are a few things to think about:

• The 01 prefix is to make sure that the secret constants are set before other initializers that make use of these constants are loaded.

• The 01_secrets.rb file should not be checked in to your SCM.

• The server(s) that store this file must be properly secured and the file itself should have maximum security.

E.g.

# config/initilizers/01_secret.rb
ENV['ENCRYPTION_KEY'] = "your_key"