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This guide demonstrates how to use Infisical to manage secrets for your Next.js + Vercel stack from local development to production. It uses:

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Project Setup

To begin, we need to set up a project in Infisical and add secrets to an environment in it.

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Create a project

  1. Create a new project in Infisical.
  2. Add a secret to the development environment of this project so we can pull it back for local development. In the Secrets Overview page, press Explore Development and add a secret with the key NEXT_PUBLIC_NAME and value YOUR_NAME.
  3. Add a secret to the production environment of this project so we can sync it to Vercel. Switch to the Production environment and add a secret with the key NEXT_PUBLIC_NAME and value ANOTHER_NAME.

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Create a Next.js app

Initialize a new Node.js app. We can use create-next-app to initialize an app called infisical-nextjs. 
npx create-next-app@latest --use-npm infisical-nextjs
cd infisical-nextjs
Next, inside pages/_app.js, lets add a console.log() to print out the environment variable in the browser console. 
import '@/styles/globals.css'

export default function App({ Component, pageProps }) {
    console.log('Hello, ', process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_NAME);
    return <Component {...pageProps} />
}

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Infisical CLI for local development environment variables

We’ll now use the Infisical CLI to fetch secrets from Infisical into your Next.js app for local development.

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CLI Installation

Follow the instructions for your operating system to install the Infisical CLI.
Use brew package manager
$ brew install infisical/get-cli/infisical

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Login

Authenticate the CLI with the Infisical platform using your email and password. 
$ infisical login

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Initialization

Run the init command at the root of the Next.js app. This step connects your local project to the project on the Infisical platform and creates a infisical.json file containing a reference to that latter project. 
$ infisical init

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Start the Next.js app with secrets injected as environment variables

$ infisical run -- npm run dev
If you open your browser console, Hello, YOUR_NAME should be printed out. Here, the CLI fetched the secret from Infisical and injected it into the Next.js app upon starting up. By default, the CLI fetches secrets from the development environment which has the slug dev; you can inject secrets from different environments by modifying the env flag as per the CLI documentation. At this stage, you know how to use the Infisical CLI to inject secrets into your Next.js app for local development.

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Infisical-Vercel integration for production environment variables

Use our Vercel Secret Syncs guide to sync secrets from Infisical to Vercel as production environment variables. At this stage, you know how to use the Infisical-Vercel integration to sync production secrets from Infisical to Vercel.
The following environment variable names are reserved by Vercel and cannot be synced: AWS_SECRET_KEY, AWS_EXECUTION_ENV, AWS_LAMBDA_LOG_GROUP_NAME, AWS_LAMBDA_LOG_STREAM_NAME, AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_NAME, AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_MEMORY_SIZE, AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_VERSION, NOW_REGION, TZ, LAMBDA_TASK_ROOT, LAMBDA_RUNTIME_DIR, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SESSION_TOKEN, AWS_REGION, and AWS_DEFAULT_REGION.

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FAQ

Vercel does not specialize in secret management which means it lacks many useful features for effectively managing environment variables. Here are some features that teams benefit from by using Infisical together with Vercel:
  • Audit logs: See which team members are creating, reading, updating, and deleting environment variables across all environments.
  • Versioning and point in time recovery: Rolling back secrets and an entire project state.
  • Overriding secrets that should be unique amongst team members.
And much more.
Yes. Your secrets are still encrypted at rest. To note, most secret managers actually don’t support end-to-end encryption.Check out the security guide.
See also: