{"id":244709,"date":"2023-08-23T08:47:02","date_gmt":"2023-08-23T15:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/?p=244709"},"modified":"2024-01-19T10:52:18","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T18:52:18","slug":"safely-use-secrets-in-http-requests-in-visual-studio-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/safely-use-secrets-in-http-requests-in-visual-studio-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Safely use secrets in HTTP requests in Visual Studio 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 17.8 Preview 1 version of Visual Studio 2022 we have updated the HTTP file editor<\/a> to enable you to externalize variables to make testing your Web APIs across different environments easier. This update also includes support to handle secrets in a secure fashion. To access these new features, you\u2019ll need to install 17.8 Preview 1, or later, which you can do with the link below.<\/p>\n

Download Visual Studio 2022 Preview<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n

In previous releases if you wanted to use a variable in an HTTP file in Visual Studio, the variable would have to be defined directly in the HTTP file itself. This makes it more difficult to test different environments with the same HTTP file, and it also makes it hard to exercise web APIs that require secrets. In this post you\u2019ll learn about how you can define variables in external file(s) and then reuse those variables across different HTTP files. You\u2019ll also learn the different ways that you can secure your secrets and reuse those in a secure way in HTTP files. Before we get to the secrets support let\u2019s take a look at the environment file support first.<\/p>\n

Environment file overview<\/h2>\n

When working with HTTP files<\/a> in Visual Studio 2022 you can define multiple HTTP requests that you can execute from within the IDE. In previous releases you were able to define variables that could be used throughout the file. In this release you can externalize variables so that you can define different sets of values, environments, to be used. This also enables you to use the same environments across different HTTP files.<\/p>\n

To support different environments, you can add an HTTP request environment file which has the filename httpenv.json<\/em>. You can also store user-specific values in an httpenv.json.user<\/em> file, but we will get to that later in this post. Before we get to the httpenv.json<\/em> file, let\u2019s look at a small HTTP file that has a few requests defined.<\/p>\n

@TemplatesApi_HostAddress = localhost:44320\r\n@searchTerm=api\r\n@templatePackId=MadsKristensen.AspNetCore.Miniblog\r\n@numToSkip=5\r\n@numToTake=2\r\n\r\nGET https:\/\/{{TemplatesApi_HostAddress}}\/api\/search\/{{searchTerm}}\r\n###\r\nGET https:\/\/{{TemplatesApi_HostAddress}}\/api\/templatepack\/{{templatePackId}}\r\n###\r\nGET https:\/\/{{TemplatesApi_HostAddress}}\/api\/templatepack\/{{numToSkip}}\/{{numToTake}}\r\n###<\/code><\/pre>\n
In this file you can see that we\u2019ve defined a few variables, the lines that start with @ define the variables. Since these variables are defined in the file, it may be difficult to exercise this app across different environments. For example, if we want to test the API that is running locally, we will use the localhost<\/em> address. To exercise an app that has been published to a public endpoint, we may want to use a public URL instead of localhost<\/em>. Let\u2019s look at the first request that is defined in this sample.<\/p>\n
GET https:\/\/{{TemplatesApi_HostAddress}}\/api\/search\/{{searchTerm}}\r\n###<\/code><\/pre>\n
In this request we are using the following variables.<\/p>\n