I need my docker containers to connect to different PostgreSQL server, depending on the environment (test & production). What I desire is testing my application locally with local database instance, and push the fixes after. From what I read, PostgreSQL's default connection parameters can be determined by environment variables, so I think writing two different environment variables files for test/production and pass the desired one in with --env-file option of docker run command would do the trick.
Is this a suitable way to test & deploy an web application? If not, what would be a better solution?
Yes, in general this is the approach you should take when using Docker. Store your DB connection parameters (URL, Username, Password) in environment variables. There is no real need to use an environment file unless you have a ton of environment variables, you could also pass an arbitrary number of "-e" parameters to docker as well. This is closer to how services like amazon's ECS will expect you to pass parameters.
If you're going to write those to a file, make sure that the file is encrypted/encoded somehow - storing database passwords in a file in plaintext is not a great security practice.
When a PHP application makes a database connection it of course generally needs to pass a login and password. If I'm using a single, minimum-permission login for my application, then the PHP needs to know that login and password somewhere. What is the best way to secure that password? It seems like just writing it in the PHP code isn't a good idea.
Several people misread this as a question about how to store passwords in a database. That is wrong. It is about how to store the password that lets you get to the database.
The usual solution is to move the password out of source-code into a configuration file. Then leave administration and securing that configuration file up to your system administrators. That way developers do not need to know anything about the production passwords, and there is no record of the password in your source-control.
If you're hosting on someone else's server and don't have access outside your webroot, you can always put your password and/or database connection in a file and then lock the file using a .htaccess:
<files mypasswdfile>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
The most secure way is to not have the information specified in your PHP code at all.
If you're using Apache that means to set the connection details in your httpd.conf or virtual hosts file file. If you do that you can call mysql_connect() with no parameters, which means PHP will never ever output your information.
This is how you specify these values in those files:
php_value mysql.default.user myusername
php_value mysql.default.password mypassword
php_value mysql.default.host server
Then you open your mysql connection like this:
<?php
$db = mysqli_connect();
Or like this:
<?php
$db = mysqli_connect(ini_get("mysql.default.user"),
ini_get("mysql.default.password"),
ini_get("mysql.default.host"));
Store them in a file outside web root.
For extremely secure systems we encrypt the database password in a configuration file (which itself is secured by the system administrator). On application/server startup the application then prompts the system administrator for the decryption key. The database password is then read from the config file, decrypted, and stored in memory for future use. Still not 100% secure since it is stored in memory decrypted, but you have to call it 'secure enough' at some point!
This solution is general, in that it is useful for both open and closed source applications.
Create an OS user for your application. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
Create a (non-session) OS environment variable for that user, with the password
Run the application as that user
Advantages:
You won't check your passwords into source control by accident, because you can't
You won't accidentally screw up file permissions. Well, you might, but it won't affect this.
Can only be read by root or that user. Root can read all your files and encryption keys anyways.
If you use encryption, how are you storing the key securely?
Works x-platform
Be sure to not pass the envvar to untrusted child processes
This method is suggested by Heroku, who are very successful.
if it is possible to create the database connection in the same file where the credentials are stored. Inline the credentials in the connect statement.
mysql_connect("localhost", "me", "mypass");
Otherwise it is best to unset the credentials after the connect statement, because credentials that are not in memory, can't be read from memory ;)
include("/outside-webroot/db_settings.php");
mysql_connect("localhost", $db_user, $db_pass);
unset ($db_user, $db_pass);
If you are using PostgreSQL, then it looks in ~/.pgpass for passwords automatically. See the manual for more information.
Previously we stored DB user/pass in a configuration file, but have since hit paranoid mode -- adopting a policy of Defence in Depth.
If your application is compromised, the user will have read access to your configuration file and so there is potential for a cracker to read this information. Configuration files can also get caught up in version control, or copied around servers.
We have switched to storing user/pass in environment variables set in the Apache VirtualHost. This configuration is only readable by root -- hopefully your Apache user is not running as root.
The con with this is that now the password is in a Global PHP variable.
To mitigate this risk we have the following precautions:
The password is encrypted. We extend the PDO class to include logic for decrypting the password. If someone reads the code where we establish a connection, it won't be obvious that the connection is being established with an encrypted password and not the password itself.
The encrypted password is moved from the global variables into a private variable The application does this immediately to reduce the window that the value is available in the global space.
phpinfo() is disabled. PHPInfo is an easy target to get an overview of everything, including environment variables.
Your choices are kind of limited as as you say you need the password to access the database. One general approach is to store the username and password in a seperate configuration file rather than the main script. Then be sure to store that outside the main web tree. That was if there is a web configuration problem that leaves your php files being simply displayed as text rather than being executed you haven't exposed the password.
Other than that you are on the right lines with minimal access for the account being used. Add to that
Don't use the combination of username/password for anything else
Configure the database server to only accept connections from the web host for that user (localhost is even better if the DB is on the same machine) That way even if the credentials are exposed they are no use to anyone unless they have other access to the machine.
Obfuscate the password (even ROT13 will do) it won't put up much defense if some does get access to the file, but at least it will prevent casual viewing of it.
Peter
We have solved it in this way:
Use memcache on server, with open connection from other password server.
Save to memcache the password (or even all the password.php file encrypted) plus the decrypt key.
The web site, calls the memcache key holding the password file passphrase and decrypt in memory all the passwords.
The password server send a new encrypted password file every 5 minutes.
If you using encrypted password.php on your project, you put an audit, that check if this file was touched externally - or viewed. When this happens, you automatically can clean the memory, as well as close the server for access.
Put the database password in a file, make it read-only to the user serving the files.
Unless you have some means of only allowing the php server process to access the database, this is pretty much all you can do.
If you're talking about the database password, as opposed to the password coming from a browser, the standard practice seems to be to put the database password in a PHP config file on the server.
You just need to be sure that the php file containing the password has appropriate permissions on it. I.e. it should be readable only by the web server and by your user account.
An additional trick is to use a PHP separate configuration file that looks like that :
<?php exit() ?>
[...]
Plain text data including password
This does not prevent you from setting access rules properly. But in the case your web site is hacked, a "require" or an "include" will just exit the script at the first line so it's even harder to get the data.
Nevertheless, do not ever let configuration files in a directory that can be accessed through the web. You should have a "Web" folder containing your controler code, css, pictures and js. That's all. Anything else goes in offline folders.
Just putting it into a config file somewhere is the way it's usually done. Just make sure you:
disallow database access from any servers outside your network,
take care not to accidentally show the password to users (in an error message, or through PHP files accidentally being served as HTML, etcetera.)
Best way is to not store the password at all!
For instance, if you're on a Windows system, and connecting to SQL Server, you can use Integrated Authentication to connect to the database without a password, using the current process's identity.
If you do need to connect with a password, first encrypt it, using strong encryption (e.g. using AES-256, and then protect the encryption key, or using asymmetric encryption and have the OS protect the cert), and then store it in a configuration file (outside of the web directory) with strong ACLs.
Actually, the best practice is to store your database crendentials in environment variables because :
These credentials are dependant to environment, it means that you won't have the same credentials in dev/prod. Storing them in the same file for all environment is a mistake.
Credentials are not related to business logic which means login and password have nothing to do in your code.
You can set environment variables without creating any business code class file, which means you will never make the mistake of adding the credential files to a commit in Git.
Environments variables are superglobales : you can use them everywhere in your code without including any file.
How to use them ?
Using the $_ENV array :
Setting : $_ENV['MYVAR'] = $myvar
Getting : echo $_ENV["MYVAR"]
Using the php functions :
Setting with the putenv function - putenv("MYVAR=$myvar");
Getting with the getenv function - getenv('MYVAR');
In vhosts files and .htaccess but it's not recommended since its in another file and its not resolving the problem by doing it this way.
You can easily drop a file such as envvars.php with all environment variables inside and execute it (php envvars.php) and delete it. It's a bit old school, but it still work and you don't have any file with your credentials in the server, and no credentials in your code. Since it's a bit laborious, frameworks do it better.
Example with Symfony (ok its not only PHP)
The modern frameworks such as Symfony recommends using environment variables, and store them in a .env not commited file or directly in command lines which means you wether can do :
With CLI : symfony var:set FOO=bar --env-level
With .env or .env.local : FOO="bar"
Documentation :
When adding a database (postgresql) to my application in openshift the username and password is generated automatically. Is it possible to regenerate this password or to set it to a username/password of my choice?
OpenShift recommends that you do not change the default passwords that are setup for your database access. Changing them can cause issues with maintenance that needs to be done on your application/database from time to time. Also, the environment variables are not updated when you change your password (and I'm not sure that you can override them and set them yourself manually), you will have to use hard-coded values in your code. It is up to you whether or not you change them, but again, it is not recommended.
I'm asking this out of concern for my database's security. Meteor encourages developers to remove the insecure package and move all database-altering operations to methods executed safely on the server, which one can happily do.
However, it strikes me after deploying to mywebsite.com with meteor deploy mywebsite.com that the command meteor mongo mywebsite.com seems to be accessible and connective for anyone who cares to run it? How would one mitigate this direct access, or is it not actually as open as I believe?
I was worried for no reason - the credentials that you set up when deploying an application for the first time are required for access to the production database from an unfamiliar machine. You will be interactively prompted when accessing via meteor mongo.
I've been following a tutorial with express, node and mongo.
I have in a config file on the server side:
production:{
db:'mongodb://MYUSERNAME:MYPASSWORD#ds033307.mongolab.com:33307/dbname',
rootPath:rootPath,
port:process.env.PORT||80
}
so, i have my username and password in clear text in a server side javascript file. should i be worried about this? if yes, where else can I put it?
Thanks.
Edit: I went back and had a look at mongolab and heroku (where my site is hosted) docs.
Where I found: "The MongoLab add-on contributes one config variable to your Heroku environment: MONGOLAB_URI", and so I was able to put the MONGOLAB_URI env var into my config and move the password out of the source code.
With regards to the same datacenter, am I right to assume heroku would not be hosting my mongolab database in their datacenter, but would instead be calling out to a cloud service mongo database? Not much I can do then, is there, if I want to stick with mongolab and heroku?
I know this question is old but according to Heroku's docs they currently use 2 datacenters (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/regions#data-center-locations).
Their US server is 'amazon-web-services::us-east-1' and their EU alternative is 'amazon-web-services::eu-west-1'.
Both of these data centers are available when launching mongo instances on Mongolab so you can choose for both your app and your db to be on the same datacenter giving much improved security.
I think you should always be concerned about storing passwords in source code files. Generally you would be much better off keeping it in a configuration file that is managed separately. This gives you the flexibility to use the same code with a different configuration file to point to development or qa databases.
Of bigger concern perhaps - are you hosting your application in the same datacenter that MongoLab is hosting your database? If not, that user name and password, along with your data, will traverse the internet in the clear.
MongoLab does not currently support SSL (other than for their RestAPI) so even they recommend being in the same data center:
Do you support SSL?
Not yet but it is on our roadmap to be available in Summer 2014. In
the meantime, we highly recommend that you run your application and
database in the same datacenter. If you have a Dedicated plan, we also
highly recommend that you configure custom firewall rules for your
database(s).
Rest API:
Each MongoLab account comes with a REST API that can be used to access
the databases, collections and documents belonging to that account.
The API exposes most the operations you would find in the MongoDB
driver, but offers them as a RESTful interface over HTTPS.
I would definitely read MongoLab's security page fairly closely:
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/security/