Where should server environment variables be stored in Ruby on Rails? - ruby-on-rails

Question

Where should I store keys specific to my development, test, production servers in my ruby project? For example where should store my development-specific amazon s3 secret and key? my config/development.rb file? One issue I see with that is if the file was a part of a public github project it would show for everyone.
Thanks!

Answer 1

You store separate environment variables in config/development.rb, config/testing.rb and config/production.rb respectively.
However, if your files will be stored in a public git repo, you do not want to hardcode any sensitive information into them. The best method is to use either yaml files that are part of your .gitignore or to use Environment variables in your shell. I prefer the latter, like this:
PAPERCLIP_OPTIONS = { storage: :s3,
bucket: ENV['S3_BUCKET'],
s3_credentials: { access_key_id: ENV['S3_KEY'],
secret_access_key: ENV['S3_SECRET'] }}
You then just set the environment variables on the system that is running the app.
If you use the yaml config file method, you must add the sensitive config files to your .gitignore file. Otherwise they will still be uploaded to your public repo.

Answer 2

If you look at config directory, you will see a YAML file, containing database credential information. You could do the same for your cloud environments.
development:
server: xiy-234
username: hello
password: 1325abc
production:
...

Answer 3

You can put those information inside a .yml file in the config directory.
For instance:
production:
access_key_id: xxx
secret_access_key: xx
bucket: xxx
development:
access_key_id: xxx
secret_access_key: xxx
bucket: xxx
staging:
access_key_id: xxx
secret_access_key: xxx
bucket: xxx
Once this is done, you have to store those keys in a Hash by doing the following:
APIS_CONFIG = {'amazons3' => YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/amazons3.yml")[Rails.env]}
(You can put the previous line of code inside a .rb file situated in the config/initializers directory)
Note that you might find this Railscast interesting.