I want to define a log in function in my init script, but I don't want to hardcode my login credentials. I think a good workaround is to have my init script read in my login credentials from a local file and save these values as variables. That way, I can exclude the file from my git index, which keeps my login credentials secure.
Are there any suggestions on this approach, or ways to set an argument to a value that is defined in a file?
For example, I would like to use the following in my init.el
:
;; Set up our login variables here:
(setq file-location "~/.emacs.d/.login")
(setq erc-username "default-name")
(setq erc-password "default-password")
(setq erc-url "default-url")
(setq erc-port "default-port")
(defun read-lines (filePath)
"Return a list of lines of a file at filePath."
(with-temp-buffer
(insert-file-contents filePath)
(split-string (buffer-string) "\n" t)))
(if (file-exists-p file-location)
(progn (setq login-credentials (read-lines file-location))
(setq erc-username (nth 0 login-credentials))
(setq erc-password (nth 1 login-credentials))
(setq erc-url (nth 2 login-credentials))
(setq erc-port (nth 3 login-credentials)))
(message "No ERC login credentials provided. Please add login credentials as '<username>\n<password>\n<url>\n<port>' in ~/.emacs.d/.login to activate ERC mode."))
;; These message the values from my file correctly.
;; Everything up to this point works as expected
(message erc-username)
(message erc-password)
(message erc-url)
(message erc-port)
;; Use our login variables here
;; This doesn't work because the 'quote' function prevents evaluation of my variables, and a 'backquote' did not resolve it either
(custom-set-variables
;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
'(markdown-command "/usr/bin/pandoc")
'(tls-program (quote ("openssl s_client -connect %h:%p -no_ssl2 -ign_eof -CAfile ~/.ssl/spi_ca.pem -cert ~/.ssl/znc.pem")))
'(znc-servers (quote ((,erc-url ,erc-port t ((irc\.freenode\.net ,erc-username ,erc-password)))))))
(custom-set-faces
;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
)
Note that my example uses the znc.el
module here. I am modifying the autogenerated code resulting from the Emacs configs in M-x customize-group RET znc RET
and M-x customize-variable RET tls-program RET
.
My issue with the above code is that the variables are not loading inside my custom-set-variables
function above. Loading the proper values from a file seems to work fine, but I can't seem to use them as an argument. I believe this is related to the quote
function, which prevents evaluation of its contents. I attempted a 'backquote' (,
) to force evaluation, but it is not working either. Any suggestions to fix this bug or offering another approach would be very helpful.