CODEWITHSUNDEEP
oauthelixirphoenix-frameworkueberauth
Alex Fallenstedt
Alex Fallenstedt

Reputation: 2093

Elixir Phoenix setting and using environment variables

I have a phoenix app that is making an OAuth call to github. I want to store my secret keys as environment variables so I can keep them out of version control.

I have created a file called .env where I define my private key:

export GITHUB_CLIENT_ID="891538_my_key_bf0055"

I attempt to obtain my private key in my config.exs file, the file responsible for configuring your application using System.Config.

config :ueberauth, Ueberauth.Strategy.Github.OAuth, client_id: System.get_env("GITHUB_CLIENT_ID"), client_secret: System.get_env("GITHUB_SECRET_ID")

To make a long story short, my controller is almost able to handshake with github for the request. When I make a request to github to authorize my app, http://localhost:4000/auth/github, I can almost make a request and I see a 404 page from github. I have noticed that the url has no client_id though!

My router to access the callback is

  scope "/auth", Discuss do
    pipe_through :browser # Use the default browser stack

    # make request to github, google, fb
    get "/:provider", AuthController, :request
    get "/:provider/callback", AuthController, :callback
  end

And what I get is URL with no value https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize?client_id=&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A4000%2Fauth%2Fgithub%2Fcallback&response_type=code&scope=user%2Cpublic_repo`

If I don't use an environment variable in config.exs and instead use the string value, the request work as it should.

How do I use environment variables in Phoenix?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2520

Answers (4)

TNT
TNT

Reputation: 3620

For development – when running by iex -S mix phx.server – you can set the variables in .iex.exs:

System.put_env(%{"GITHUB_CLIENT_ID" => "891538_my_key_bf0055",
                 "GITHUB_SECRET_ID" => "1234567890asdfghjkls"})

Upvotes: 0

hisa_py
hisa_py

Reputation: 929

If you want your ENV vars to stay visible only in the process of your app you can put them in the .env file and execute your app with

env $(cat .env | grep -v ^# | xargs) iex -S mix phoenix.server

Of course, in production you might want to try some more sophisticated mechanism but the above works ok for simple/dev use case and it will let you know if your application is reading the ENV var correctly.

Upvotes: 1

BachirC
BachirC

Reputation: 199

You shouldn't wrap the client_id string with double quotes. Write it as is :

export GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=891538_my_key_bf0055

Before launching your server or IEx, don't forget to source .env.

Upvotes: 2

Mike Buhot
Mike Buhot

Reputation: 4885

If using Distillery releases, you may want to avoid using System.get_env/1 from inside the config.exs files, as it will store the value of the environment variable at build time, rather than runtime.

In the prod.exs configuration, you can use 

config :ueberauth, Ueberauth.Strategy.Github.OAuth,
    client_id: "${GITHUB_CLIENT_ID}",
    client_secret: "${GITHUB_SECRET_ID}"

Then generate the release with REPLACE_OS_VARS=true environment variable set.

Distillery Docs

Upvotes: 3

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