Multi-Environment Setup

Understanding Environments

Environments allow you to manage separate sets of secrets for different stages of your application lifecycle:

• Development: Used during local development
• Staging: For testing before production deployment
• Production: For your live application
• Custom environments: Create any custom environment you need

Creating Environments

Environments are created in the ByteHide cloud panel:

1. Navigate to your project
2. Go to the Settings tab
3. In the Environments section, click Add
4. Enter a name for your environment (e.g., "staging")
5. Optionally connect a repository to this environment
6. Click Save

Setting Environment-Specific Secrets

Once you've created environments, you can set environment-specific values for each secret key:

1. Go to the Keys tab in your project
2. Click Create secret to add a new secret
3. Enter a key name (e.g., "database-connection")
4. Add values for each environment
5. Click Save

Accessing Environment-Specific Secrets

Set Environment at Initialization

The most common approach is to set the environment when initializing the SDK:

// Set environment via environment variable
// BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_ENVIRONMENT=production
ManagerSecrets.Initialize();

// Or directly (not recommended for production)
ManagerSecrets.UnsecureInitialize("your-token", "production");

// Now all secret requests will use "production" environment
var connectionString = Products.Secrets.Get("database-connection"); // Gets production value

Specify Environment for Individual Requests

You can also override the environment for specific requests:

// Initialize with default environment (e.g., development)
ManagerSecrets.Initialize();

// Get secrets from specific environments
var devConnection = await Products.Secrets.GetAsync("database-connection", environment: "development");
var stagingConnection = await Products.Secrets.GetAsync("database-connection", environment: "staging");
var prodConnection = await Products.Secrets.GetAsync("database-connection", environment: "production");

Environment Configuration in Different Scenarios

Local Development

// .NET CLI/Visual Studio - environment variables
// On Windows (PowerShell):
$env:BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_TOKEN = "your-token"
$env:BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_ENVIRONMENT = "development"

// On macOS/Linux:
export BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_TOKEN=your-token
export BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_ENVIRONMENT=development

ASP.NET Core Development

In appsettings.Development.json:

{
  "ByteHide": {
    "Environment": "development"
  }
}

In Startup.cs:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    var environment = Configuration["ByteHide:Environment"] ?? "development";
    
    // Initialize ByteHide with the environment
    ManagerSecrets.Initialize(); // Will read from env vars
    
    // Register as singleton
    services.AddSingleton<ISecretProvider>(new ByteHideSecretProvider(environment));
}

CI/CD Pipeline

In your CI/CD workflows, set the appropriate environment:

# GitHub Actions example
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # ...
      - name: Set ByteHide Environment
        run: |
          # For staging branch
          if [[ "${{ github.ref }}" == "refs/heads/develop" ]]; then
            echo "BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_ENVIRONMENT=staging" >> $GITHUB_ENV
          # For main branch
          elif [[ "${{ github.ref }}" == "refs/heads/main" ]]; then
            echo "BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_ENVIRONMENT=production" >> $GITHUB_ENV
          else
            echo "BYTEHIDE_SECRETS_ENVIRONMENT=development" >> $GITHUB_ENV
          fi

Best Practices

Environment Naming Convention

Use consistent environment names across your organization:

• development (or dev)
• testing (or test)
• staging (or stg)
• production (or prod)

Value Consistency

Maintain the same key structure across environments with different values:

api-key:
  - development: "sk_test_123"
  - staging: "sk_test_456"
  - production: "sk_live_789"

Environment Validation

Validate that the environment exists:

public static async Task ValidateEnvironment(string environment)
{
    try 
    {
        // Try to get any secret with this environment
        await Products.Secrets.GetAsync("api-key", environment: environment);
        return true;
    }
    catch (EnvironmentNotFoundException)
    {
        throw new Exception($"ByteHide environment '{environment}' does not exist");
    }
}

Next Steps

• Learn how to access secrets
• Manage environments in the cloud panel