Secrets

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Coder is open-minded about how you get your secrets into your workspaces. For more information about how to use secrets and other security tips, visit our guide to security best practices.

Use this guide to configure how templates make secrets available to Coder workspaces. To authenticate workspace provisioners with Coder, see the provisioners documentation. For secret values that developers manage themselves, see User secrets.

Before you begin

Your first attempt to use secrets with Coder should be your local method. You can do everything you can locally and more with your Coder workspace, so whatever workflow and tools you already use to manage secrets may be brought over.

Often, this workflow is simply:

Give your users their secrets in advance
Your users write them to a persistent file after they've built their workspace

Template parameters are a dangerous way to accept secrets. We show parameters in cleartext around the product. Assume anyone with view access to a workspace can also see its parameters.

SSH Keys

Coder generates SSH key pairs for each user. This can be used as an authentication mechanism for git providers or other tools. Within workspaces, git will attempt to use this key within workspaces via the $GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable.

Users can view their public key in their account settings:

SSH keys in account settings

Note

SSH keys are never stored in Coder workspaces, and are fetched only when SSH is invoked. The keys are held in-memory and never written to disk.

User secrets

User secrets are developer-managed values that Coder injects at workspace start. If a user secret targets the same environment variable name or file path as a template-provided variable or file, Coder injects the user secret into that workspace. A secret can be disabled, in which case it is stored but not injected until it is re-enabled. User secret values are covered by Database Encryption when it is enabled. See the User secrets guide.

Dynamic Secrets

Dynamic secrets are attached to the workspace lifecycle and automatically injected into the workspace. With a little bit of up front template work, they make life simpler for both the end user and the security team.

This method is limited to services with Terraform providers, which excludes obscure API providers.

Dynamic secrets can be implemented in your template code like so:

resource "twilio_iam_api_key" "api_key" {
  account_sid   = "ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
  friendly_name = "Test API Key"
}

resource "coder_agent" "main" {
  # ...
  env = {
    # Let users access the secret via $TWILIO_API_SECRET
    TWILIO_API_SECRET = "${twilio_iam_api_key.api_key.secret}"
  }
}

A catch-all variation of this approach is dynamically provisioning a cloud service account (e.g GCP) for each workspace and then making the relevant secrets available via the cloud's secret management system.

Displaying Secrets

While you can inject secrets into the workspace via environment variables, you can also show them in the Workspace UI with coder_metadata.

Secrets UI

Can be produced with

resource "twilio_iam_api_key" "api_key" {
  account_sid   = "ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
  friendly_name = "Test API Key"
}


resource "coder_metadata" "twilio_key" {
  resource_id = twilio_iam_api_key.api_key.id
  item {
    key   = "Username"
    value = "Administrator"
  }
  item {
    key       = "Password"
    value     = twilio_iam_api_key.api_key.secret
    sensitive = true
  }
}

Secrets Management

For more advanced secrets management, you can use a secrets management tool to store and retrieve secrets in your workspace. For example, you can use HashiCorp Vault to inject secrets into your workspace.

Refer to our HashiCorp Vault Integration guide for more information on how to integrate HashiCorp Vault with Coder.

Next steps

Security - best practices

Follow security best practices to harden your Coder deployment against common risks.