Secrets Management

If your Umbraco Cloud project uses sensitive information such as API keys, encryption keys, and connection strings, it is recommended to store these as secrets.

There are two ways to add secrets to your Cloud project, as an Environment Secrets or as a Shared Secrets.

Environment Secrets are intended to be utilized exclusively within a particular environment during the runtime of your Umbraco solution.

Shared Secrets are utilized across all environments and will be seamlessly integrated into any new environment you create. Shared Secrets are particularly well-suited for safeguarding credentials necessary for project development, such as access to private NuGet feeds.

Utilizing environment-specific secrets for private NuGet feeds will result in the unsuccessful creation of new environments due to the unknown status of the secret. In such instances, Shared Secrets should be used.

Typical secrets are Private Keys, 3rd-party API tokens, database passwords, or otherwise sensitive data that needs to be kept secret.

When the secrets have been added they will be exposed exclusively to the assigned environments.

It will be assigned as an environment variable at runtime using the assigned name for the secret.

It will then use a reference that only the managed identity of the environment has access to.

You can add secrets to your Umbraco Cloud environments if you are on a standard plan or higher.

How to add secrets

When adding a secret to your environment it will restart.

To add a secret to your environment follow these steps:

1. Go to your Umbraco Cloud project

2. Go to the settings section and go to Secret Management

3. Choose either shared or environment secrets

4. Choose the environment to add the secret and click Add secret

5. Add the Key and the Value in the fields and click Add secret

6. Save the key to the environment.

Working locally with secrets

When you develop locally, you cannot access secrets that are stored in the key vault associated with a cloud environment.

We recommend that you use common methods for handling secrets locally, such as using app settings in the appsettings.development.json.

The app setting should not be committed to the code repository or it needs to be ignored via a gitignore file.

An example could be that you have a secret in a cloud environment with the key name "ApiKey",

You should specify this with a corresponding name in a configuration file such as appsettings.development.json:

{
   “Serilog”: {
     …
   },
   “Umbraco”:{
     …
   },
   “ApiKey”: “Value”,
}

Access secrets in a Umbraco Solution

Secrets for cloud environments are stored in a key vault and loaded by the app service (using a key vault reference) as an environment variable.

This enables you to get the value at runtime as you normally would fetch an environment variable.

You can use the method, getting it from the System namespace in .NET as below:

_secretMessage = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("SecretMessage");

Secrets can also be used to override AppSettings defined in appsettings.json files.

In order for this to work, when adding the secret, the Key value should be all the settings' names joined by double underscores.

For example, to change the Serilog's default options under Serilog:MinimumLevel:Default, the Secret key would look like this:

Serilog__MinimumLevel__Default

The value defined in appsettings.json file will be overwritten with the Cloud Secret's value.

Naming standards for secrets

When naming a secret, it is possible to use alphanumeric characters as well as '_' (underscore).

There are some reserved words that cannot be accepted:

• COMMAND

• HOME

• PORT

• REMOTE

• DEBUGGING

• VERSION

• REGION_NAME

• CONNECTIONSTRINGS__UMBRACODBDSN

There are also a number of prefixes that are not accepted.

The list consists of:

• UMBRACO_

• WEBSITE_

• SCM_

• SDEPLOY_

• DEPLOYMENT_

• DOCKER_

• CONTAINER_

• DIAGNOSTICS_

• APPSERVICEAPPLOGS_

• WEBSITE_

• DOTNET_

• IDENTITY_

• MSI_

• WEBJOBS_

• FUNCTIONS_

• AzureWebJobsWP_

• PHP_

• FILE_

• DATABASE_

• WORDPRESS_

• MACHINEKEY_

Accepted Prefixes

While we have a number of prefixes that are not accepted, we do allow the use of the below prefixes for Secrets on Umbraco Cloud:

• Umbraco__CMS__Global__Smtp__

• Umbraco__Forms__Security__FormsApiKey

• Umbraco__Forms__FieldTypes__Recaptcha

• Umbraco__CMS__Integrations

• Umbraco__CMS__DeliveryAPI

It is also possible to use Secrets to save API keys, Passwords, and ReChaptcha for all our Umbraco products on Umbraco Cloud.

Do you have an existing or new secret that you want to add to a key vault that conflicts with the name restrictions?

Then please contact Umbraco support, then we will then consider it as soon as possible.