Question

Securing SMTP credentials

Posted on August 17, 2021
Security PaaS DigitalOcean App Platform PHP
Asked by brownjohno1993

Hi, I’m using Google’s SMTP server to act as the integration for my contact form (PHP). The site is being hosted in your App Platform, I don’t really want to have to use Droplet. I’ve had it working locally, but before I’m ready to use it on the App Platform I need to figure out how to correctly store the SMTP Password.

I don’t want to commit it to code for obvious reasons, but I’m struggling to find out how I can use it. I’m looking at environment variables which are encrypted, but I can’t seem to find any documentation for decrypting it so I can actually use the password for authentication. I don’t really want to have to go down the route of MySQL to store my SMTP credentials, but if I have to then fine.

Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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Jon Friesen

DigitalOcean Employee

• August 17, 2021

Accepted Answer

👋 @brownjohno1993

Great question! App Platform will automatically decrypt and inject the plaintext into the the environment variable for the component (or entire app if using global vars). You don’t need to do the decrypting, we do that for you!

Thanks for bringing this up, our documentation is a bit lacking here! We’ll get that fixed up!

Hope this helps :)