For developers
Sensitive environment variables

3min
For security reasons, it's important to keep sensitive data, like access keys or security tokens, outside the code repository. Hosty is no-UI hosting blueprint, therefore there's no interface to add sensitive environment variables. However, Hosty has a recommended approach to deal with sensitive data.
Hosty assumes that deployments are handled in CI tools﻿ , like CircleCI or similar. These tools have mechanism to add environment variables and store them on their side. Then, during a deployment job in CI, there must be a step to create a .env file (the name can be different, but it's important to stick to the dotenv-like file structure). The last step is to configure Hosty to load environment variables from it. Let's look it each step is a bit more detail.
Step 1: Add environment variables to your CI platform
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Example screenshot taken from CircleCI
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Step 2: Add a step to add environment variables to a .env file
The name of the file with secrets can be any, as long as it follows dotenv file format.
.circleci/config.yml
- run:
    name: Create a file with sensitive environment variables
    command: |
      echo "FORECAST_ACCOUNT_ID=$FORECAST_ACCOUNT_ID" >> .env.secrets
      echo "FORECAST_API_KEY=$FORECAST_API_KEY" >> .env.secrets
      echo "HARVEST_ACCOUNT_ID=$HARVEST_ACCOUNT_ID" >> .env.secrets
      echo "HARVEST_API_KEY=$HARVEST_API_KEY" >> .env.secrets
- run:
    name: Create a file with sensitive environment variables
    command: |
      echo "FORECAST_ACCOUNT_ID=$FORECAST_ACCOUNT_ID" >> .env.secrets
      echo "FORECAST_API_KEY=$FORECAST_API_KEY" >> .env.secrets
      echo "HARVEST_ACCOUNT_ID=$HARVEST_ACCOUNT_ID" >> .env.secrets
      echo "HARVEST_API_KEY=$HARVEST_API_KEY" >> .env.secrets
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Step 3: Tell Hosty.yaml to load environment variables from the file
For each application container, you can specify an optional parameter environmentFiles with the list of the dotenv-formatted files containing environment variables for the container. Here's an example for the php container:
hosty.yaml
applications:
  backend:
    #... 
    php:
      # Explicitly defined environment variables.
      environmentVariables:
        BACKEND_URL: "https://{{ node.host.0 }}"
        APPLICATION_MODE: development
      # Tell Hosty to load the file with environment variables
      # generated in the previous build step.  
      environmentFiles:
        - ./.env.secrets
applications:
  backend:
    #... 
    php:
      # Explicitly defined environment variables.
      environmentVariables:
        BACKEND_URL: "https://{{ node.host.0 }}"
        APPLICATION_MODE: development
      # Tell Hosty to load the file with environment variables
      # generated in the previous build step.  
      environmentFiles:
        - ./.env.secrets
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Hosty will load environment variables from the file and make them available in the deployed container (in this particular example - php container).
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Environment variables
CI/CD configuration