Installing New Relic without adding license key to repo

Question

I want to install New Relic on one of my open source rails applications (v 3.2.12). I don't want to have the license key in the repo. I'd like to load it with something like ENV.

By default that's loaded in the newrelic.yml file.

Where is that YAML file loaded? I guess I could manually merge it with a hash that loads the license from the ENV hash.

Any hints on how to do that?

Answer 1

I use the Figaro gem to handle secret keys with ENV environment variables, similar to you. For New Relic, I have:

config/application.yml (.gitignored and not pushed to source control)

# ...
NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY: {{MY_KEY}}

which is then referenced in config/newrelic.yml:

# ...
license_key: <%= ENV['NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY'] %>

A file called config/application.example.yml gets pushed up to the source code repo with instructions to put your own license key in:

config/application.example.yml

# ...
NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY: # put your license key here

Also see this StackOverflow Q&A for more details:
What should be removed from public source control in Ruby on Rails?