Hi - I’m struggling to find something that I saw that discussed this issue kind
of.
In my image (its actually a headless one - but this could apply to a fat image
too) - I build an application that needs access to a service (in this case an
S3 bucket).
The AWS library I’m using (but others are similar) has an AWSLogin class
singleton where I can specify a username and password. So in a playground I can
do that and test it all works etc.
However, for deployment its never a good idea to encode this info into your
code (particularly if you use Iceberg and GitHub) - SO, I am using secret
variable support in GitLab - which I’ve seen many projects do in other
languages. This way, I type in those details into an encrypted place in the CI
and it then exposes them as temporary variables when I build my system (so far
so good).
Now in my build - I run a little script like this and pass on those variables
(neatly, Gitlab doesn’t show their values in its logs):
./pharo Pharo.image --no-default-preferences --save --quit st config.st \
"{‘$USER'. ‘$PWD'}"
In config.st I then extract these command line parameters (the ST handler
nicely exposes the extra parameter array so I didn’t have to do anything custom)
"Expect image to be called with params as a last arg array"
config := Array readFrom: Smalltalk arguments last.
user := config at: 1.
pwd := config at: 2.
DBConfig default
accessKey: user;
pKey: pwd;
yourself.
So it all looks pretty good so far - however it occurs to me that if you get
hold of a .image and were to browse all of the Strings - e.g.
./pharo Pharo.image eval "(ByteString allInstances)”
I think you would ulimtately find those strings unless the Class encrypts them
in some way right?
So I’m wondering why we don’t have an EncryptedString object for just this
(I’ve seen lots of cryptography libraries etc), but isn’t this quite a common
thing to deal with? And should Pharo provide something that library writers
adopt to encourage better image safety? Or am I wrong in my analysis?
Tim
