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Configure connector credentials

Rill requires credentials to connect to remote data sources such as private buckets (S3, GCS, Azure), data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery), OLAP engines (ClickHouse, Apache Druid) or other DuckDB sources (MotherDuck). Please refer to the appropriate connector and OLAP engine page for instructions to configure credentials accordingly.

At a high level, configuring credentials and credentials management in Rill can be broken down into three categories:

Setting credentials for Rill Developer​

When reading from a source (or using a different OLAP engine), Rill will attempt to use existing credentials that have been configured on your machine.

  1. Credentials that have been configured in your local environment via the CLI (for AWS / Azure / Google Cloud)
  2. Credentials that have been passed in directly through the connection string or DSN (typically for databases - see Source YAML and Connector YAML for more details)
  3. Credentials that have been passed in as a variable when starting Rill Developer via rill start --env key=value
  4. Credentials that have been specified in your <RILL_PROJECT_HOME>/.env file

For more details, please refer to the corresponding connector or OLAP engine page.

Ensuring security of credentials in use

If you plan to deploy a project (to Rill Cloud), it is not recommended to pass in credentials directly through the local connection string or DSN as your credentials will then be checked directly into your Git repository (and thus accessible by others). To ensure better security, credentials should be passed in as a variable / configured locally or specified in the project's local .env file (which is part of .gitignore and thus won't be included).

Variables​

Project variables work exactly the same way as credentials and can be defined when starting rill via --env key=value or set in the .env file in the project directory.

variable=xyz

This variable will then be usable and referenceable for templating purposes in the local instance of your project.

Fun Fact

Connector credentials are essentially a form of project variable, prefixed using the connector.<connector_name>.<property> syntax. For example, connector.druid.dsn and connector.clickhouse.dsn are both hardcoded project variables (that happen to correspond to the Druid and ClickHouse OLAP engines respectively).

Avoid committing sensitive information to Git

It's never a good idea to commit sensitive information to Git and goes against security best practices. Similar to credentials, if there are sensitive variables that you don't want to commit publicly to your rill.yaml configuration file (and thus potentially accessible by others), it's recommended to set them in your .env file directly and/or use rill env set via the CLI (and then optionally push / pull them as necessary).

Deploying to Rill Cloud​

Ready to Deploy?

Please see our deploy credentials page to configure your credentials on Rill Cloud.

Pulling Credentials and Variables from a Deployed Project on Rill Cloud​

If you are making changes to an already deployed instance from Rill Cloud, it is possible to sync the credentials and variables from the Rill Cloud to your local instance of Rill Developer.

rill env pull​

For projects that have been deployed to Rill Cloud, an added benefit of our Rill Developer-Cloud architecture is that credentials that have been configured can be pulled locally for easier reuse (instead of having to manually reconfigure these credentials in Rill Developer). To do this, you can run rill env pull from your project's root directory to retrieve the latest credentials (after cloning the project's git repository to your local environment).

Pulling credentials from Rill Cloud

Overriding local credentials

Please note when you run rill env pull, Rill will automatically override any existing credentials or variables that have been configured in your project's .env file if there is a match in the key name. This may result in unexpected behavior if you are using different credentials locally.

rill env push​

As a project admin, you can either use rill env configure after deploying a project or rill env push to specify a particular set of credentials that your Rill Cloud project will use. If choosing the latter, you can update your <RILL_PROJECT_HOME>/.env file with the appropriate variables and credentials that are required. Alternatively, if this file has already been updated, you can run rill env push from your project's root directory.

  • Rill Cloud will use the specified credentials and variables in this .env file for the deployed project.
  • Other users will also be able to use rill env pull to retrieve these defined credentials for local use (with Rill Developer).
Overriding Cloud credentials

If a credential and/or variable has already been configured in Rill Cloud, Rill will warn you about overriding if you attempt to push a new value in your .env file. This is because overriding credentials can impact your deployed project and/or other users (if they pull these credentials locally). Pushing credentials that already exist to Rill Cloud