This guide demonstrates how to use Infisical to manage secrets for your Node stack from local development to production. It uses:
To begin, we need to set up a project in Infisical and add secrets to an environment in it.
Create a new project in Infisical.
Add a secret to the development environment of this project so we can pull it back for local development. In the Secrets Overview page, press Explore Development and add a secret with the key NAME
and value YOUR_NAME
.
Now that we’ve created a project and added a secret to its development environment, we need to configure an Infisical Machine Identity that our Node application can use to access the secret.
For this demonstration, we use a minimal Express application. However, the same principles will apply to any Node application such as those built on Koa or Fastify.
Initialize a new Node.js project with a default package.json
file.
Install express
and @infisical/sdk, the client Node SDK for Infisical.
Finally, create an index.js file containing the application code.
Here, we initialized a client
instance of the Infisical Node SDK with the Infisical Token
that we created earlier, giving access to the secrets in the development environment of the
project in Infisical that we created earlier.
Finally, start the app and head to http://localhost:3000
to see the message Hello, Your Name.
The client fetched the secret with the key NAME
from Infisical that we returned in the response of the endpoint.
At this stage, you know how to fetch secrets from Infisical back to your Node application. By using Infisical Tokens scoped to different environments, you can easily manage secrets across various stages of your project in Infisical, from local development to production.
Isn't it inefficient if my app makes a request every time it needs a secret?
The client SDK caches every secret and implements a 5-minute waiting period before
re-requesting it. The waiting period can be controlled by setting the cacheTTL
parameter at
the time of initializing the client.
What if a request for a secret fails?
The SDK caches every secret and falls back to the cached value if a request fails. If no cached
value ever-existed, the SDK falls back to whatever value is on process.env
.
What's the point if I still have to manage a token for the SDK?
The token enables the SDK to authenticate with Infisical to fetch back your secrets. Although the SDK requires you to pass in a token, it enables greater efficiency and security than if you managed dozens of secrets yourself without it. Here’re some benefits:
And much more.
See also: