Rails dotenv production issue

Question

[ bin/setup ] [{"RAILS_ENV"=>"test"}, "bin/rails db:reset"] succeeded
[ bin/setup ] Dropping & recreating the test database
[ bin/setup ] Executing [{"RAILS_ENV"=>"production"}, "bin/rails db:reset"]
rails aborted!
ArgumentError: Missing `secret_key_base` for 'production' environment, set this string with `bin/rails credentials:edit` (ArgumentError)

        raise ArgumentError, "Missing `secret_key_base` for '#{Rails.env}' environment, set this string with `bin/rails credentials:edit`"
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
/home/mustdos/Ruby Stuff/MUPSA/config/environment.rb:5:in `<main>'
Tasks: TOP => db:reset => db:drop => db:load_config => environment
(See full trace by running task with --trace)
[ bin/setup ] [{"RAILS_ENV"=>"production"}, "bin/rails db:reset"] failed

Hello all, I tried using dotenv with .env.testing .env.development and .env.production but I can't seem to get the .env.production running.

How should I solve this issue?

Answer 1

According to the Ruby on Rails documentation

In test and development applications get a secret_key_base derived from the app name. Other environments must use a random key present in config/credentials.yml.enc.

So as your error message suggests, we need to set a secret_key_base.

1. It can any random string so let's generate one randomly using securerandom. You can run this to get a random string of 64 characters.

require 'securerandom'
SecureRandom.hex(64)

2. Now, let's create and set it in our encrypted secrets. I use VSCode so my command for editing my secrets so my command will be like this.

EDITOR="code --wait" rails credentials:edit --environment production

That will open the decrypted state of the encrypted file that contains your secrets. It should be empty since you haven't set any before. Set your secret_key_base like so:

secret_key_base: xxxxxxxx
other_secret: 123

3. Save and close the file. That will create you two files:

• production.key which the key that is used to decrypt your secrets encrypted file. That file contains sensible data and should not be public (not pushed to your Git repository). If you deploy your application somewhere, this should be set as an environment variable called RAILS_MASTER_KEY. This should be added to your .gitignore file.
• production.yml.enc which is the secrets encrypted file.

Now, you should be able to access your secrets like so in your code:

Rails.application.credentials.secret_key_base
Rails.application.credentials.other_secret
Rails.application.credentials.{secret_key}

4. And you should be able to perform production environment operation such as rails console or rails db:migrate.

PS: In your development environment, it is actually using a secret_key_base that is automatically generated in tmp/development_secret.txt if you didn't set any with the steps above. Reference is here.