Safekeeper, Keeping Your Go Secrets Out of Git

I’ve been wanting to open-source Glukit for a while but I had to find a way to keep the client ids/secrets safe and outside of git before I could do so.

Since Glukit runs on the Google App Engine, it can’t itself just read the sensitive information from environment variables. I read a post that suggested storing the secret keys in the datastore but I had quite a few and felt like this solution lacked good integration in the development flow.

After reading about go generate, I thought that this might be a good use for it. If I could get a way to use go generate and generate my app secrets into code that was going to be ommitted from the repository, I’d have something relatively simple and convenient.

Enter safekeeper

Based on the go generate examples, I set myself out to create a command-line tool that would take a few inputs and generate a file to be git ignored containing all application secrets. You have to follow the instructions to get a nice integration but once it’s set up, developers can set their secrets in their environment and then they just have to run go generate or goapp generate to get them into the code to deploy or run.

I tried to include a detailed example of how it can be used effectively but let me know if you find anything missing.

Cheers!