Visual Studio Mac: manage user secrets

Somewhat surprisingly and inconveniently, Visual Studio for Mac does not have the handy command Manage User Secrets. It’s not hidden in a different menu, it’s simply not there.

If you need to add a single secret to your project, you can use a one-liner in the project folder:

cd repo/project
dotnet user-secrets set "ConnectionStrings:Project" "Server=127.0.0.1"

To add a number of secrets, save your secrets in a temporary .json file:

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "Project": "Server=127.0.0.1"
  }
}

Then navigate to the project folder in a terminal and use dotnet to import the file:

cd repo/project
cat /tmp/secrets.json | dotnet user-secrets set

The secrets are stored in ~/.microsoft/usersecrets under the appropriate hash.

To see the currently stored secrets, use dotnet user-secrets list. For more examples, see the app secrets docs page.