In an ASP.NET Core application, you can use appsettings.Development.json to store user secrets by leveraging the built-in Secret Manager tool. The Secret Manager tool allows you to store sensitive data, such as passwords, API keys, or connection strings, outside of your code and configuration files, in a safe and secure way.
To use the Secret Manager tool, you can follow these steps:
1. Open a command prompt or terminal window and navigate to the root folder of your ASP.NET Core application.
2. Run the following command to create a new user secret:
dotnet user-secrets set "MySecretKey" "MySecretValue"
Replace MySecretKey and MySecretValue with your own secret key and value.
3. Open your appsettings.Development.json file and add the following configuration section:
"MySecrets": { "MySecretKey": "placeholder-value" }
Replace MySecretKey with the same key you used in step 2.
4. In your code, you can retrieve the secret value by calling the IConfiguration interface and using the GetSection and GetValue methods, like this:
var mySecretValue = configuration.GetSection("MySecrets")["MySecretKey"];
The Secret Manager tool will ensure that your secrets are stored securely on your development machine, outside of your code and configuration files, and will only be accessible to authorized users.
Note that when you deploy your ASP.NET Core application to a production environment, you should use a different method to store and manage your secrets, such as environment variables, Azure Key Vault, or AWS Secrets Manager, to ensure that your secrets are kept safe and secure.