How to protect your Django Secret and OAuth Keys [2024 revised]

If you've stumbled upon my article, I assume you are working on a Django project and are wondering how to secure your project information, more importantly, security keys. If so, you've come to the right place as I am about to teach you the best method of doing it.

More often than not, I see many of my software engineer friends miss a couple of key points when developing Django projects, and that is, not hiding their SECRET_KEY and other OAuth keys. This is a crucial part of the security of Django as any information exposed can revoke a project.

Let's begin. Suppose we have just started a brand new Django project. Just in case, here is the format:

django-admin startproject project

Now that we have created a new project, let's navigate into the root directory, that being project/, and into the settings.py file.

On the 23rd line of the code, you will find a variable titled SECRET_KEY.

import os

# Build paths inside the project like this: os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ...)
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname...

# SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret!
SECRET_KEY = 'ek0@9u(zemu^+%*-z3!&y9mu_7u+edg9%)c%423mdoec-mi*'

Here we see that, for the purpose of this blog post, my Django security key is exposed.

Now, I will introduce to you a method that will ensure you never expose your project's private keys ever again, dotenv.

In your project terminal, type

pip3 install python-dotenv

This will install a dotenv requirement that will be used to retrieve your secret keys from a file only you have access to.

Next, in your settings.py file, C & V (copy and paste) the following two lines:

from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()

Afterward, in the root of your project, create a file titled .env which will serve as your environment variable secret storage for your project.

In the .env, you will declare your variables with an = sign and paste their information as such:

# .env
SECRET_KEY=ek0@9u(zemu^+%*-z3!&y9mu_7u+edg9%)c%423mdoec-mi*

Next, in your settings.py, you will retrieve the key as follows:

# settings.py
SECRET_KEY = str(os.getenv('SECRET_KEY'))

What this line does is make the os (operating system) get the .env file and bring in the data for the following key: SECRET_KEY.

To ensure no one receives access to the .env file, it is a general protocol to put your .env file in the .gitignore to make sure it won't be committed to GitHub.

If you were using any other keys, such as OAuth keys, the method would work the same. For example, here I will implement an OAuth key to use the Twitter OAuth method.

# settings.py
TWITTER_OAUTH_KEY = str(os.getenv('TWITTER_OAUTH_KEY'))

and retrieve the key from my environment file,

# .env
TWITTER_OAUTH_KEY=[twitter-oauth-key-here]

---

If you would like to follow my software engineering path, feel free to follow me on GitHub.

Comments

[Matthew Schwartz]

Good tip. My solution is to commit a settings_base.py file with the Django project. On each deployed system (including local) I then have a settings.py file which imports the base file and overrides anything secret or unique to the system.

Your solution is also very convenient when working with docker. It's common practice to pass settings into containers using environment variables.

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

That's also a very viable solution. Thank you for the comment!

[quroom]

If you want to set default value, you can use like

 = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SECRET_KEY', 'DEFAULT_KEY')

 = bool( os.environ.get('DJANGO_DEBUG', True) )

Then you don't need more settings for production and development.
Just on and off ```

load_dotenv()

[Michael Atolwa]

This really helped me a lot!

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

That's pretty clever, I'll be sure to keep it in mind for my next project

[quroom]

I referenced it from mdn ;)
Have a nice day.

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

pretty cool either way. thank you, and likewise!

[Yumei Leventhal]

Hi there, I joined this forum just to ask this question :-) about this fantastic tip in this post:

My question relates to adding the .env file into .gitignore. How can an app run without the SECRET coming along in production? I read somewhere that a new .env file needs to be created on the production site. In that case, what's the difference between uploading the .env along with the rest of the app and creating a new .env file? Is the concern mostly over the security during uploading?

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

Thanks for your comment and welcome to Dev! So from my understanding, you already have a .env file in your development server. If that .env file works for you in development, keep that since it will most likely work for production as well. Any time I develop anything for production, I try to keep the .env consistent and hidden in the .gitignore. There shouldn't be any difference between uploading the development .env for production, as long as Django knows where to find your .env.

The biggest security concern that will come up in regards to the environment secrets is accidentally committing them to Github. Let me know if that clears up your question.

Happy Coding!

[Yumei Leventhal]

Yes, this totally cleared up the fog on my end: Exposing the .env on GitHub is a security risk (as opposed to having .env on a server). Thank you for taking the time to explain! And yes, I followed the steps in this post and everything works beautifully. Since I read your post and became aware of the issue of protecting Django secret, I've read other posts on how to do it-but none is as clean and easy to follow. So thank you for bringing this issue to the attention of new Django learners.

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

It is absolutely my pleasure! So glad it helped :)

[Jake Mulhern]

I followed all of the instructions and copy and pasted everything but I get the error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'dotenv'. Any idea why this might be?

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

Hey! Thanks for your comment. One possibility might be you didn't install the module, which can be done with pip3 install python-dotenv. Another possibility, if you already installed the module, your requirements might not have been updated yet which can be done with pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

Let me know if you continue receiving the error, hopefully, this helped.

[Jake Mulhern]

I appreciate the response! I installed the module but I think I figured out that I did not install Django correctly in the context of the application and that was causing the issue. I will update with more errors if needed.

[rzeczuchy]

This was a really helpful article, thank you! If you write anything else on Django security in the future, I'll definitely give it a read.

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

Thank you! I really appreciate the feedback 🙂

[Henry Chizoba]

Great tip. A question.

How do i put my .env file in the gitignore?

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

you would just list it plainly as that: .env (unless it's not in the same directory as the gitignore file of course)

# .gitignore
.env
env/
...

[Henry Chizoba]

Ok thanks for your response. I have 2 questions.

First, I can't seem to locate the 'gitignore file' on my django project directory.

Second is, the code:
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()

it brings an error saying "unresolved import 'dotenv' in my problem terminal.

I did install dotenov and correctly too. You might have an answer for me? I'm a beginner with django. Thank you

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

The .gitignore file is one you have to manually create, it doesn't come with the initial Django project directory. Make sure its in the same directory as your manage.py file, along with requirements, etc.

[vladyslav nykoliuk]

For the first one, the .gitignore file doesn't come with the initial Django project - you have to manually create it. Make sure it's in the same directory as the manage.py, requirements, etc.

For the dotenv, do the errors still show up after you run:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

?

[Henry Chizoba]

Thank you, i fixed it already. Thanks.