Ruby on Rails config.secret_token error

Question

I just started learning ruby on rails. I followed a lot of install examples, but when i ran the example am getting this error

A secret is required to generate an integrity hash for cookie session data. Use config.secret_token = "some secret phrase of at least 30 characters"in config/initializers/secret_token.rb

I search for it but i dont see too much help.

plz help.

Platform: Mac OS X.

Answer 1

The easiest way to generate a new secret token is to run

rake secret

at the command line.

Answer 2

Your token should have been generated automatically by Rails, but you could still use something like:

irb(main):007:0> "#{ActiveSupport::SecureRandom.hex(64)}"
=> "921b00fcfabe0368d70627020f3b4c969cfd9bdc2474f4040c1ae976f687014694beb5d36dfc0c41bac8ebde96a14fceaee228d6e34d8183c5d7cc99d310d4f9"

meaning, you can generate some random string and put it into your config/initializers/secret_token.rb file:

# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

Yourapp::Application.config.secret_token = '921b00fcfabe0368d70627020f3b4c969cfd9bdc2474f4040c1ae976f687014694beb5d36dfc0c41bac8ebde96a14fceaee228d6e34d8183c5d7cc99d310d4f9'

Answer 3

This is an issue with rails version probably. I had this issue when I uninstalled Rails 4 and installed Rails 3. After checking rails -v and seeing that it was indeed Rails 3, I executed rails new myapp. For some reason the configuration file config/initializers/secret_token.rb had the "config.secret_key_base" variable defined, which appears to be how Rails 4 does it. I was able to fix it by changing it to "config.secret_token", which I believe is what Rails 3 uses.