CI/CD in Ruby with CircleCI
Run Ruby CI/CD in CircleCI with an encrypted .env.vault file
Find a complete code example on GitHub for this guide.
Initial setup
Create a build.rb
file. It's a very simple build script that outputs 'Hello World'.
build.rb
# build.rb
puts "Hello #{ENV["HELLO"]}"
Create a Gemfile
.
Gemfile
# frozen_string_literal: true
source "https://rubygems.org"
Run bundle install
to generate the Gemfile.lock
.
bundle install
Create a .circleci/config.yml
file.
.circleci/config.yml
# .circleci/config.yml
version: 2.1
orbs:
ruby: circleci/[email protected]
jobs:
build:
docker:
- image: cimg/ruby:2.7.3
steps:
- checkout
- ruby/install-deps
- run:
name: Ruby build
command: ruby build.rb
Commit all that to code and push to GitHub. Then connect your GitHub repo to CircleCI.
Once pushed, the CircleCI build will say 'Hello '
as it doesn't have a way to access the environment variable yet. Let's do that next.
Install dotenv-vault
Install dotenv-vault
.
bundle add dotenv-vault
Create a .env
file in the root of your project.
.env
# .env
HELLO="World"
As early as possible in your application, import and configure dotenv-vault
along with bundler/setup
.
build.rb
# build.rb
require "bundler/setup"
require "dotenv-vault/load"
puts "Hello #{ENV["HELLO"]}"
Try running it locally.
ruby build.rb
Hello World
Perfect. ENV
now has the keys and values you defined in your .env
file.
That covers local simulation of the CI. Let's solve for the real CI environment next.
Build .env.vault
Push your latest .env
file changes and edit your CI secrets. Learn more about syncing
npx dotenv-vault@latest push
npx dotenv-vault@latest open ci
Use the UI to configure those secrets per environment.
Then build your encrypted .env.vault
file.
npx dotenv-vault@latest build
Its contents should look something like this.
.env.vault
#/-------------------.env.vault---------------------/
#/ cloud-agnostic vaulting standard /
#/ [how it works](https://dotenv.org/env-vault) /
#/--------------------------------------------------/
# development
DOTENV_VAULT_DEVELOPMENT="/HqNgQWsf6Oh6XB9pI/CGkdgCe6d4/vWZHgP50RRoDTzkzPQk/xOaQs="
DOTENV_VAULT_DEVELOPMENT_VERSION=2
# ci
DOTENV_VAULT_CI="x26PuIKQ/xZ5eKrYomKngM+dO/9v1vxhwslE/zjHdg3l+H6q6PheB5GVDVIbZg=="
DOTENV_VAULT_CI_VERSION=2
Set DOTENV_KEY
Fetch your CI DOTENV_KEY
.
npx dotenv-vault@latest keys ci
# outputs: dotenv://:[email protected]/vault/.env.vault?environment=ci
Set DOTENV_KEY
on CircleCI.
Build CI
Commit those changes safely to code and rerun the build.
That's it! On rerun, your .env.vault
file will be decrypted and its CI secrets injected as environment variables – just in time. It will say Hello ci
.
You'll know things worked correctly when you see 'Loading env from encrypted .env.vault'
in your logs. If a DOTENV_KEY
is not set (for example when developing on your local machine) it will fall back to standard dotenv functionality.
You succesfully used the new .env.vault standard to encrypt and deploy your secrets. This is much safer than scattering your secrets across multiple third-party platforms and tools. Whenever you need to add or change a secret, just rebuild your .env.vault file and redeploy.