SecretSpec 0.7: Declarative Secret Generation

If you haven’t tried SecretSpec yet, see Announcing SecretSpec for an introduction.

SecretSpec 0.7 introduces declarative secret generation — declare that secrets should be auto-generated when missing, directly in your secretspec.toml.

The Problem

When onboarding to a project, developers typically need to:

1. Read docs to understand which secrets are needed
2. Manually generate passwords and tokens
3. Store them in the right provider

Some secrets — like local database passwords or session keys — don’t need to be shared at all. They just need to exist.

The Solution: type + generate

Add type and generate to any secret declaration, and SecretSpec handles the rest:

[project]
name = "my-app"
revision = "1.0"


[profiles.default]
DB_PASSWORD = { description = "Database password", type = "password", generate = true }
API_TOKEN = { description = "Internal API token", type = "hex", generate = { bytes = 32 } }
SESSION_KEY = { description = "Session signing key", type = "base64", generate = { bytes = 64 } }
REQUEST_ID = { description = "Request ID prefix", type = "uuid", generate = true }

Run secretspec check or secretspec run, and any missing secret with generate configured is automatically created and stored in your provider:

$ secretspec check
Checking secrets in my-app (profile: default)...


✓ DB_PASSWORD - generated and saved to keyring (profile: default)
✓ API_TOKEN - generated and saved to keyring (profile: default)
✓ SESSION_KEY - generated and saved to keyring (profile: default)
✓ REQUEST_ID - generated and saved to keyring (profile: default)


Summary: 4 found, 0 missing

On subsequent runs, the stored values are reused — generation is idempotent.

Five Generation Types

Custom Options

Use a table instead of true for fine-grained control:

# 64-character password with printable ASCII
ADMIN_PASSWORD = { description = "Admin password", type = "password", generate = { length = 64, charset = "ascii" } }


# 64 random bytes, hex-encoded (128 chars)
ENCRYPTION_KEY = { description = "Encryption key", type = "hex", generate = { bytes = 64 } }

Shell Commands

The command type runs arbitrary shell commands, covering any generation need:

# WireGuard private key
WG_PRIVATE_KEY = { description = "WireGuard key", type = "command", generate = { command = "wg genkey" } }


# MongoDB keyfile
MONGO_KEYFILE = { description = "MongoDB keyfile", type = "command", generate = { command = "openssl rand -base64 765" } }


# SSH public key (from existing key)
SSH_PUBKEY = { description = "SSH public key", type = "command", generate = { command = "ssh-keygen -y -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519" } }

Design Decisions

Generate if missing, never overwrite. Existing secrets are always preserved. This makes generation safe to declare in shared config files — it only fills in gaps.

No separate generate command. Generation happens automatically during check and run. A dedicated CLI command for rotation is planned for a future release.

type without generate is valid. You can annotate secrets with a type for documentation purposes without enabling generation. This is useful for secrets that must be manually provisioned but benefit from type metadata.

Conflicts are caught early. generate + default on the same secret is an error (which value should win?). type = "command" with generate = true (no command string) is also an error.

Upgrading

Update to SecretSpec 0.7 and add type/generate to any secrets you want auto-generated. Existing configurations continue to work without changes — both fields are optional.

curl -sSL https://install.secretspec.dev | sh

See the configuration reference for full documentation.

Share your thoughts on our Discord community or open an issue on GitHub.

Domen

Last updated Oct 11, 2026