When are secrets added to the deploy environment?

Questions / Help
1

Hi everyone,

Today I ran into this error:

Compilation error in file lib/my_app/airtable/client.ex ==
** (CompileError) lib/my_app/airtable/client.ex:11: invalid literal nil in <<>>

The faulting line is here:
IO.puts("Key: " <> Application.get_env(:my_app, :airtable_api_key))

In config/runtime.exs I have:
config :my_app, airtable_api_key: System.get_env("AIRTABLE_API_KEY")

The AIRTABLE_API_KEY had been set through fly secrets.

So my question is, are these secrets available at compilation?

2

I don’t think secrets are available to the build/compilation stage. You can choose to do a local build using fly deploy --local-only, for instance, and then the secrets definitely won’t be fetched into your machine.

There is a section in the fly.toml called

[build.args]
  RAILS_ENV = "production"
  RACK_ENV = "production"

which you could use. I would hesitate to put secrets in it, though.

I’m not too familiar with Elixir, let me page @Mark to ask if it’s possible to move configuration like this out of the build step.

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3

fly secrets are available at runtime in the Fly environment. Since you could be building locally using Docker, they are not available during build. I don’t know if they might be available during build using a fly remote builder.

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4

Secrets are only available at runtime. You can use build arguments as @sudhir.j said, but those are insecure since they get written to the final image. Unless you need to call a third party api from the build, you can set AIRTABLE_API_KEY to a placeholder value so it’s not null during initialization but still the correct value once deployed.

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