Retrieve a specific secret provider from the secret store

The default workings of the secret store, is that a set of secret providers are registered and the consumer gets access to all of secrets provided by using ISecretProvider.

In some cases, you may want to retrieve a specific secret provider from the store because that secret provider has some functionality that the other providers don't have.

In those cases, you can register your secret provider with a unique name so that, in a later stage, you can retrieve back your named provider.

Registering a named secret provider

Lets consider that you want explicitly use the built-in environment variables secret provider. First, the secret provider has to be registered with a unique name.

.ConfigureSecretStore((config, stores) =>
{
    stores.AddEnvironmentVariables(..., name: "environment-variables");
})

⚠ The name of the registered secret providers should be unique; otherwise, an exception will be thrown when you try to access the GetProvider or GetCachedProvider.

Retrieving a named secret provider

Now that the named environment variables secret provider is registered, we are able to retrieve this provider in our application.

Instead of injecting ISecretProvider in your application to access secrets, we'll inject ISecretStore interface to retrieve named secret providers.

using Arcus.Security.Core;
using Arcus.Security.Core.Caching;
using Arcus.Security.Core.Providers;

namespace Application
{

    [ApiController]
    public class OrderController : ControllerBase
    {
        public class OrderController(ISecretStore secretStore)
        {
             // Gets the `ISecretProvider` with the matched name (with either using the `ISecretProvider` as return type or your own generic type).
             var secretProvider = secretStore.GetProvider<EnvironmentVariableSecretProvider>("environment-variables");

             // Gets the `ICachedSecretProvider` with the matched name (with either using the `ICachedSecretProvider` as return type or your own generic type).
             // Mark that this only works when the secret provider was registered as a cached secret provider.
             ICachedSecretProvider cachedSecretProvider = secretStore.GetCachedProvider("your-cached-secret-provider");
        }
    }
}