Reading a connectionstring from secrets.json

As we are still using SQL accounts to connect to our databases locally, I wanted to avoid accidently checking in the SQL account information. So instead of storing my connectionstring directly in the appsettings.json file I wanted to use the secrets.json file instead. Let us find out how to achieve this...

When storing your connectionstring inside your appsettings.json you can use the GetConnectionString() method to fetch a connectionstring:

	{
	"Logging": {
	"LogLevel": {
	"Default": "Information",
	"Microsoft.AspNetCore": "Warning"
	}
	},
	"AllowedHosts": "*",
	"ConnectionStrings": {
	"Default": "<Add connectionstring here>"
	}
	}

view raw appsettings.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
	string connString = builder.Configuration.GetConnectionString("Default");

view raw GetConnectionString.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The same technique also works when using the built-in secret manager tool and the corresponding secrets.json. By default user secrets are loaded when your environmentname is set to Development. You can explicitly enable this by adding the following code:

	var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
	// Add services to the container.
	builder.Configuration.AddUserSecrets<Program>();

view raw AddUserSecrets.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

User Secrets are stored in a separate secrets.json. You can edit the secrets using the Secret Manager tool (dotnet user-secrets) or directly in Visual Studio by right clicking on the web project and choosing ‘Manage User Secrets’:

Remark: You can find the secrets.json file here at %APPDATA%\Microsoft\UserSecrets\<user_secrets_id>\secrets.json

The information in the appsettings.json and secrets.json will be merged. The connectionstring should be added to the secrets.json file using the following format(similar to the appsettings.json):

	{
	"ConnectionStrings": {
	"Default": "<Add your connectionstring here>"
	}
	}

view raw secrets.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub