How to use secrets.yml for API_KEYS in Rails 4.1?

Question

In one of my recent projects I started out by .gitignoring the files containing secrets and environment variables. So the entire project is committed to the repo ex

Answer 1

First rule: DO NOT CHECK-IN secrets.yml into the repo.

All right, here's how a secret.yml would look:

development:
  secret_key_base: 6a1ada9d8e377c8fad5e530d6e0a1daa3d17e43ee... 
  # Paste output of $ rake secret here for your dev machine.

test:
  secret_key_base: _your_secret_ as above

production:
  secret_key_base: <%= secure_token %>


  STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY: 'Put your stripe keys for production'
  STRIPE_SECRET_KEY: 'Put actual keys for production here'
  FB_APP_SECRET: 'same as above'
  FB_CALLBACK_URL: 'FB url here'
  FB_CALLBACK_UPDATE_URL: 'FB url here'
  GOOGLE_KEY: 'Put your keys for production'
  GOOGLE_SECRET: 'same as above'
  TWITTER_KEY: 'same as above'
  TWITTER_SECRET: 'same as above'
  TWITTER_USERNAME: 'same as above'
  LINKEDIN_KEY: 'same as above'
  LINKEDIN_SECRET: 'same as above'

Note the secure_token up there in the production: block. On production server I'm using an initializer to dynamically generate secret_tokens on-the-fly.

sidenote: be careful about spaces and tabs inside the .yml file. It must be properly formatted and spaced (such as having a space after the ':' symbol).

To set it up on production you could then scp the file directly from your local or use the capistrano-secrets-yml gem.

This will not work. See an updated method as per @OddityOverseer's answer below.

To access the environment variables in your app environments/production.rb use:

FB_APP_SECRET            = ENV['FB_APP_SECRET']
FB_CALLBACK_URL          = ENV['FB_CALLBACK_URL']
FB_CALLBACK_UPDATE_URL   = ENV['FB_CALLBACK_UPDATE_URL']
GOOGLE_KEY               = ENV['GOOGLE_KEY']
GOOGLE_SECRET            = ENV['GOOGLE_SECRET']
TWITTER_KEY              = ENV['TWITTER_KEY']
TWITTER_SECRET           = ENV['TWITTER_SECRET']
TWITTER_USERNAME         = ENV['TWITTER_USERNAME']
LINKEDIN_KEY             = ENV['LINKEDIN_KEY']
LINKEDIN_SECRET          = ENV['LINKEDIN_SECRET']

---

UPDATED August-2016:

To access the environment variables in your app environments/production.rb use:

FB_APP_SECRET            = Rails.application.secrets.FB_APP_SECRET
FB_CALLBACK_URL          = Rails.application.secrets.FB_CALLBACK_URL
FB_CALLBACK_UPDATE_URL   = Rails.application.secrets.FB_CALLBACK_UPDATE_URL
GOOGLE_KEY               = Rails.application.secrets.GOOGLE_KEY
GOOGLE_SECRET            = Rails.application.secrets.GOOGLE_SECRET
TWITTER_KEY              = Rails.application.secrets.TWITTER_KEY
TWITTER_SECRET           = Rails.application.secrets.TWITTER_SECRET
TWITTER_USERNAME         = Rails.application.secrets.TWITTER_USERNAME
LINKEDIN_KEY             = Rails.application.secrets.LINKEDIN_KEY
LINKEDIN_SECRET          = Rails.application.secrets.LINKEDIN_SECRET

That's about it.