How to keep the app secret a secret?

Question

Every new Play app gets a new application secret generated into its config file.

application.secret=asdfadsfdasf

I\'m developing an open source app

Answer 1

It looks like that secret is important, but you can generate new ones for production vs development. So for development you could check it into SVN then generate a different one for production.

http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.0/production

Answer 2

You can externalize the secret as an environment variable.

In conf/application.conf Simply replace

application.secret=abc123...

with

application.secret=${APP_SECRET}

and then set this config var in Heroku with:

$ heroku config:add APP_SECRET=abc123...

Now you can manage secrets on a per-app basis and avoid checking them into version control.