Bring your towel and join one of the fastest growing data communities. Welcome to our second-generation open source orchestration platform, a completely rethought approach to dataflow automation.

Prefect Community

Hey all, what's the best Prefect block to store credentials like API key and token? Is JSON block good?

You’ll want to use a Secret block rather than a JSON block for storing sensitive data. See blocks info <https://docs.prefect.io/latest/concepts/blocks/|here>.

But secret block only stores 1 string value. What if I want to store key value pair, like a username and password. Do I need to use two separate secret blocks here?

```In [1]: from prefect.blocks.core import Block
14:12:12.038 | DEBUG   | prefect.profiles - Using profile 'pong'

In [2]: from prefect.blocks.fields import SecretDict

In [3]: class MyVault(Block):
   ...:     values: SecretDict
   ...:

In [4]: MyVault(values={"foo": 42})
Out[4]: MyVault(values=SecretDict('{'foo': '**********'}'))

In [5]: _.values.get_secret_value()
Out[5]: {'foo': 42}```

you could write `MyVault` someplace and then `prefect block register -f where_its_defined.py` and then that block would be available in your workspace. You'd just need the class definition wherever you want to `load` it

if you didnt want to mess around with the custom block type, you could just serialize a `dict` and store it in a `Secret` block and deserialize it after doing `Secret.load("my-secret-dict-str")`

<@U02GMEZU18B> Sorry for late follow up. Can you please explain or provide an example of serializing and deserializing a dict to be stored in `Secret` block?

CC <@U062C5BHJEA> would appreciate your help

hey moe

yeah you can do something like this if you want to use `Secret` specifically
```In [1]: from prefect.blocks.system import Secret

In [2]: import json

In [3]: d = {"b": 1, "a": 2}

In [4]: Secret(value=json.dumps(d)).save("test", overwrite=True)
Out[4]: UUID('e3f1b4a1-0844-4659-88da-806b7fa003b5')

In [5]: assert json.loads(Secret.load("test").value.get_secret_value()) == d```

Thanks Nate, realized a solution is to store the dictionary as a string in the secret block, and parse it back out in python