How do I open source my Rails' apps without giving away the app's secret keys and credentials.

Question

I have a number of Rails apps hosted on GitHub. They are all currently private, and I often will deploy them from their GitHub repository. I'd like to be able to make some of them open source, just like the ones you can find on http://opensourcerails.com.

My question is: How can I make these repositories public without giving away super secret credentials?

For example, I can look in /config/initializers/cookie_verification_secret.rb and see the cookie secret for nearly every one of them. I don't understand how this is acceptable. Are these users all changing these values in their deploy environments somehow?

Some users even expose their AWS secret and key! Others will instead set their AWS secret to something like:

ENV['aws-secret']

although I'm not sure at what point they're setting that value.

So, what are the best practices for open sourcing your Rails app without compromising your app's security.

Answer 1

Not storing any secret value at all. At any point in the history of a Git repo.
Those values should be stored elsewhere, leaving only template config files versioned, along with a script able:

• to read the right values from the external repo
• and build the final config file complete (with the secret values in it)

By keeping the tow set of data separate (sources on one side, secret values on the other), you can then open source the sources repo without comprising any secrets.

Answer 2

I recently went through this with one of my own apps. My solution was to store anything secret in a git-ignored YAML config file, and then to access that file using a simple class in the initializers directory. The config file is stored in the 'shared' folder for the Capistrano deployment and copied to config at each deploy.

Config store: http://github.com/tsigo/jugglf/blob/master/config/initializers/juggernaut.rb

Example usage: http://github.com/tsigo/jugglf/blob/master/config/initializers/session_store.rb

You may also want to remove from source control all history of the file that used these secret values. Here's a guide for doing this in Git that I used: http://help.github.com/removing-sensitive-data/

Answer 3

[EDIT - The following method has the annoyance of having to switch to the Production branch to run "rails server" in order to include necessary cookies. Thus, making edits while the server is difficult... and I'm still looking for a good solution]

After further investigation, I think the solution I was looking for was to exclude anything that stored a secret value from my Git repo's master branch (just as @VonC said). But instead of then reading from those files in a separate repo, I simply create a new "production" branch and add them to that.

This way they're excluded from Master and I can push that to Github or some other public repo just fine. When I'm ready to deploy, I can checkout the Production branch and merge Master into it and deploy Production.

I need to be able to do this because Heroku and other hosts require a single git repo to be pushed to their servers.

More information here:

http://groups.google.com/group/heroku/browse_thread/thread/d7b1aecb42696568/26d5249204c70574