View Source nitro_secret

A secrets management library for Erlang

(originally built for the Nitrogen Web Framework)

Build

make

Add as dependency

Modify your rebar.config to add nitro_secret to your deps section:

{deps, [
    nitro_secret
]}

And add nitro_secret to your application's .app or .app.src file in the applications section:

{application, your_app, [
    ...
    {applications,[
        kernel,
        stdlib,
        ...
        nitro_secret
    ]},
    ...
]}

Build your secrets file

Place your secrets in an Erlang config file (a file that can be loaded with file:consult/1).

Here is a sample secrets file.

Specify the location of the secrets file

In your app.config (or etc/nitro_secret.config, if you're using a Nitrogen release), add the following rule:

[
    {nitro_secret, [
        {secrets_filename, "/path/to/your/secrets.config"}
    ]}
].

Here is a sample nitro_secret.config

Alternatively, you don't have to specify a secrets_filename if you want to save your secrets to the default location.

The default location is: $(HOME)/.nitrogen/SHORT_NODE_NAME.secrets.config

SHORT_NODE_NAME is the portion of the return value of node() before the @. For example is your node name is named my_app@127.0.0.1, then SHORT_NODE_NAME will be my_app.

Usage

With all this done, you can then lookup secrets with:

• nitro_secret:get(Key, Default).
• nitro_secret:get(Key). (a shortcut for nitro_secret:get(Key, undefined)).

TODO

• Add encrypted file
• Generalize interface to allow handling remote services

Author

Copyright 2025 Jesse Gumm Apache 2.0 License