How to regenerate the master key for Rails 5.2 credentials

regenerate_credentials.md

If your master.key has been compromised, you might want to regenerate it.

No key regeneration feature at the moment. We have to do it manually.

1. Copy content of original credentials rails credentials:show somewhere temporarily.
2. Remove config/master.key and config/credentials.yml.enc
3. Run EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit in the terminal: This command will create a new master.key and credentials.yml.enc if they do not exist.
4. Paste the original credentials you copied (step 1) in the new credentials file (and save + quit vim)
5. Add and Commit the file config/credentials.yml.enc

Important

• Make sure config/master.key is listed in .gitignore and NOT tracked by git.
• The command EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit might not work if you require credential value in some file (initializers or database.yml). I had the problem with devise.rb. I just uncommented the line secret_key = ... just the time to run the command to regenerate the credentials file, and then commented the line out again.
• If you want to use Sublime to edit the credentials, you can replace the command EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit by EDITOR="/Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl -w" rails credentials:edit

source: https://blog.eq8.eu/til/rails-52-credentials-tricks.html

Thanks for sharing !

for step 3, set config.require_master_key = false in application.rb or production.rb otherwise an exception will be raised since a key is required to edit credentials with this set to true

@scottbarrow is this a new behaviour in rails 7?
In previous versions, the master key was re-generated automatically. But maybe this has changed

ah yeah very well could be, the code does look different

thanks for sharing this

Thank you, this helped me out today 👍

Thank you! saved me hours of hair-pulling and figuring out the workaround 👍