I am building a web app which will be sending out emails for sign up verification. I will be using https://github.com/RGBboy/express-mailer. I wanted to know whether it is safe for me to display the email password in the code and push it to the server (Heroku, AWS etc.) where the app is hosted. If not, what alternative methods should I use to 'hide' the password?
It is usually considered bad practice to have plaintext secrets/credentials stored under version control. As that could lead to security issues
Usually these sorts of info are set as environment variables. Heroku has a pretty straightforward way of doing this configuration. You can either use their web admin, or set them via command line.
As for other cases, like your development setup, this could be done with the use of .env files, which are loaded and have its values exposed to your running code. Since [express-mailer][2] is a node application, I suggest using some npm package like dotenv or node-env-file automatically do this loading.I personally prefer dotenv which I feel is simpler.
You should also check out this article regarding the use of .env files. The basic idea is to have your .gitignore(or equivalent) to ignore your .env file, thus ensuring your secret credentials are never introduced in your version control. And then setup an .env.sample file to show the developer which data needs to be declared on said .env file.
Example:
.env
EMAIL=foo#bar.com
PASSWORD=AahUbf796
S3_TOKEN=ASVNS7843NCA87SDVNBRT9
.env.sample
EMAIL=<email to access the account>
PASSWORD=<secret password>
S3_TOKEN=<s3 token for application foobar>
You shouldn't ever store secrets in version control.
One alternative (which I personally like the best) is setting secrets as environment variables for your application in your production environment. Heroku I think supports this. This is also the approach that for example Rails takes. Dev/test "secrets" (which are not actually real credentials to anything valuable) can still of course be stored in your VCS.
Another option is to encrypt the user credentials in your source code and decrypt them from your source code.
Related
I have a .NET application which uses a Web.config which in turn uses ConnectionStrings.config. By default .NET uses xml for it's config files.
I found a solution where the content of such a file is base64 encoded in a secret and decoded and stored during the build process. Most applications work with untracked/secret files like a .env.
I wonder if there is a better solution or a best practice.
GitLab supports "file type variables" which can be used to supply files with secrets to jobs. Common use cases include things like SSH keys, but should be usable for your needs.
Though, web.config also supports utilizing environment variables. That's probably the most straightforward approach. See the Microsoft Docs for more information.
I use dotenv package in my Node.js development environment. I'd like to continue using it in production. Is it okay to use .env file to set NODE_ENV=production and run it? If not - please elaborate.
It depends upon what you're using them for. In production, environment variables are usually set by your hosting environment because anyone who has access to your codebase or git repository, can easily steal information like your hashing salt or JWT private key and use it to breach your app, but if you aren't storing any sensitive information it's perfectly fine :)
I develop an application with nodejs and react. I use dotenv for configuration in my different environment.
I use TFS 2017 for build and release my application.
What is the best practise for add my .env file of production environment?
Production configs can be difficult to maintain. You can use any module or even write your own custom module to load environment variable in to your application.
However, maintaining production .env files locally for each product (i.e. committing them or putting them inside your docker image is a bad idea. If you ever happen to change some of those configs, you will have to manually change in the code for each application, build docker image (if required) and redeploy. If there are just a couple of applications, it might be easy. But if the number of related applications grow in size (as usually happens in case of microservice based architecture) - all of them sharing credentials, ips for database connections etc. it becomes a hectic task to manually change code and redeploy all the applications.
Usually, developers tend to keep a central repository of all credentials and environment variables. For examples, AWS offers parameter store and MS Azure offers Azure Key vault. In such a case, all the parameters are fetched during start time, and all we have to do is restart the application.
So usually people set only one global varibale NODE_ENV (as prod or dev), dynamically fetch all environment variables based on NODE_ENV running something like env $(node read-env-variables.js) node app.js.
I've come across people using both methods to do config management.
What are the pros and cons of each approach?
If I have a lot of variables that I store in my config object, will I have to set them all one by one in an upstart script before executing the node app?
You generally use envvar to keep an application stateless. The same codebase should work in dev, staging, test and production environment.
You will put var like MySQL config, API keys, if log is enabled or not, if debug is on or not ...
Config file are used for variables which are not dependent of the environment. For instance, name of the application, number of items per page ...
I guess you can use config.json file for storing big configs. ENV I've usually use for passing application port or something very important for normal application start. For example if you use some external lib, it's better to be able to pass custom path to lib executor in ENV.
P.S. You should never save config.json in SVN.
I am building a Node.js application and need to store database credentials (and other runtime properties) in such a way that they can be read when deployed on Heroku. My source is available in a public GitHub repository.
I am currently using environment variables, configured using heroku config:add, but am looking to understand if there are any alternatives. I would potentially like to use Cloud9 IDE, but it does not currently support environment variables.
Another option is to store the parameters in a config. file, but I believe the file would need to be checked in to Git (and as such, be publicly available) in order to be pushed to Heroku.
Thanks for your help.
ENV vars are generally considered the way to go, and the way Heroku do it themselves for database_urls and the like.
As you and your app are the only people with access to the env vars, you're generally OK security wise.
Putting credentials in Git or similar is a bad idea as it's another place that needs to be secured.
The one way I know of to solve the problem for development using command-line arguments. These can be specified in your run/debug configuration. You can then access the parameters in process.argv. Of course this means that they will be stored in your Cloud9IDE dev environment. You could then use the ENV variables in a retail production. This will at least prevent the credentials from being visible in source or config files.