Settings 6.2

The Settings page in Alert consists of the following configuration options:

Encryption configuration
Proxy configuration

The encryption fields are required in Alert, and your password and salt are required for encryption. They are used when encrypting sensitive fields in Alert such as the Black Duck API token, proxy password when storing them in the database. This ensures that the sensitive data in the database remains secure. The encryption field values must always be set.

Proxy configuration is dependent on whether you want to use a proxy in your setup.

In Alert version 5.3.0, the Default System Admin Configuration moved from the Settings configuration to the User Management page.

The configurable settings are discussed in the following sections.

Encryption configuration

Configure your encryption credentials by navigating to Settings > Encryption Configuration. The preferable method is to use environment variables when deploying Alert. If you have not set the environment variables, then you must input them through the user interface. You can use the special characters !,@,%,# in the Encryption Password and Encryption Global Salt fields. The fields must contain values between 8 – 24 characters in length.

In Alert versions 5.0.0 and higher, the encryption salt secret file name is changed. If you created the secret ALERT_ENCRYPTION_SALT in a version of Alert earlier than 5.x, you must rename the file to ALERT_ENCRYPTION_GLOBAL_SALT to use the same salt as in your previous version of Alert.

If the encryption password and salt are not set, the setup page displays before you log in, and requires you to set the required values.

The environment variables are:

ALERT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD
ALERT_ENCRYPTION_GLOBAL_SALT

To set up your encryption configuration, complete the following fields under Encryption Configuration.

Encryption Password: Type your password. The Encryption Password field is used to encrypt the data. It can be any alphanumeric string of eight characters or greater.
Encryption Global Salt: Type your salt information. The Encryption Global Salt field can contain any alphanumeric string of eight characters or greater. Along with encrypted data, this is the salt that is appended to the sensitive information before it is encrypted.
Click Save.

Environment variables are inserted at startup if there is nothing in the database for that configuration. If a value exists, you must specify the ALERT_COMPONENT_SETTINGS_SETTINGS_STARTUP_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE_OVERRIDE variable to update the old values.

Using encrypted credentials

Using Docker secrets, you can supply a file for the encryption password and a file for the encryption salt. The files must contain the text that is the password and salt to be used for encryption on the first line of the file. The files must have the following names so that Alert can read the contents for the password and the salt.

The file for the encryption password must be named ALERT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD.
The file for the encryption salt must be named ALERT_ENCRYPTION_GLOBAL_SALT.

The order of precedence is:

Environment variables for encryption.
The files in the docker secrets directory.
The database volume if the encryption data was written to the volume.

Proxy configuration

To configure your proxy environment, navigate to Settings > Proxy Configuration. To display the proxy fields, click + at the left of Proxy Configuration.

Complete the following fields.

Proxy Host: Type your proxy server host name.
Proxy Port: Type the port number to be used on your proxy server.
Proxy Username: If the proxy server requires authentication, type your proxy user name.
Proxy Password: If the proxy server requires authentication, type your proxy password.
Click Save.