How to set up Rails secrets

by Jason Swett,

This is part 4 of my series on how to deploy a Ruby on Rails application to AWS. If you found this page via search, I recommend starting from the beginning.

Overview of this step

We need to set up the Rails secrets security feature. It’s a relatively simple step although it does require us to jump through a few hoops.

1. Run rails credentials:edit

First we need to give permission to the current user, ubuntu, so we can make changes.

cd /var/www/hello_world
sudo chown -R ubuntu:ubuntu .

When we run the rails credentials:edit command, it will have us edit a credential file. We need to specify the editor that should be used for this action. In this case I’ll specify Vim.

export EDITOR=vim

Now we need to delete the existing config/credentials.yml.enc or else there will be a conflict.

rm config/credentials.yml.enc

With all these things out of the way, we can finally edit our credential file. No changes to the file are necessary. Just save and exit.

rails credentials:edit

Lastly, we need to give permissions back to the nginx user, www-data. Restart nginx afterward.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .
sudo service nginx restart

2. Verify success

Now, if you visit your EC2 instance’s URL in the browser, you should get this error:

The significant thing about this error is that it’s coming from Rails, not nginx. So we’ve made it all the way “to Rails”.

If you run tail -f log/production.log before refreshing the page, you should be able to see the exact error that’s occurring. It should be something like this:

This is telling us there’s no PostgreSQL server running, which is true. We can fix this problem in the next step: setting up our RDS database.

One thought on “How to set up Rails secrets

  1. Oliver

    Just for those who follow me! I had an issue where I could not see the Ruby error, but remained on the nginx welcome page. This was because I had not updated the root directory in the stage before – i.e. the following line needs to be updated in your nginx server information:

    root /var/www/hello_world/public;

    The line is given in the example file on the step before, but you aren’t explicitly told to change it so I originally missed it. This will then fix the issue!

    Great tutorial

    Reply

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