How to set multiline RSA private key environment variable for AWS Elastic Beans

Question

I am deploying a Ruby on Rails application to AWS using Elastic Beanstalk and have to set a private key as an environment variable

E.g

-----BEGIN RSA

Answer 1

You need to 'export' your multiline string, e.g., your private or public key into the environment correctly.

Enclose in your shell export statement $'.....' where ...... is your multiline string, e.g., your private or public key.

Example: export KEY = $'-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\nSpvpksXQIBA65ICOgQxV2TvMIICAiMeV9prhdJSKjjsk2tYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkktYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkktYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkktYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkk\n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----'

Answer 2

You could set it in EB using \n and then convert the '\n' to newlines before you pass it to config.key - something like this (note the single and double quotes in the call to gsub):

single_line_key = ENV.fetch('CLOUDFRONT_KEY')
multi_line_key = single_line_key.gsub('\n', "\n")
config.key = multi_line_key

Answer 3

In I had the same problem with Golang and the elastic beanstalk, I did this went to AWS console and set the value like this:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\nSpvpksXQIBA65ICOgQxV2TvMIICAiMeV9prhdJSKjjsk2\ntYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkk\ntYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkk\ntYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkk\ntYdz8lhn/ibROQW71utuHLAyHGMBxz3kIaaIq1kjdkkk\n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----  

inside my code

key := os.Getenv("PUSH_AUTH_KEY")
key = strings.Replace(key, `\n`, "\n", 5)