Configuration & security

Settings

Setting	Environment variable	Default
ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:DataDirectory	SHINYDOCDBMYADMIN_DATA	~/.shinydocdbmyadmin
ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:SecretKey	SHINYDOCDBMYADMIN_KEY	generated into <data>/secret.key
ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:ReadOnly	ShinyDocDbMyAdmin__ReadOnly	false
ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:DisableAi	ShinyDocDbMyAdmin__DisableAi	false
ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:DemoMode	ShinyDocDbMyAdmin__DemoMode	false
ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:FrameAncestors	ShinyDocDbMyAdmin__FrameAncestors	unset (embedding refused)

Connections themselves are configuration too — see where connections come from.

The data directory

Holds the tool’s own SQLite document store (connection profiles and saved queries — dogfooding the library) plus any uploaded database files, under <data>/uploads/<profile-id>/.

In the container it’s /data, which is why the docker run examples mount a volume there. Drop the volume and the UI starts empty every time.

Connections handed over by a host are never written to that store at all — they live in memory for as long as the process does.

The terminal front end defaults to the same directory and reads the same store, so a connection saved in one appears in the other. It adds two files of its own there: tui-settings.json (theme and page size — preferences that belong to one front end, not to the shared surface) and shinydocdb.log.

Secret key

SecretKey encrypts the secret-bearing parts of a saved profile — connection strings, SQLCipher keys and assistant API keys — with AES-GCM. Either a base64 32-byte key or a passphrase.

Set SecretKey out of band for any shared deployment

With no key configured, a random one is generated next to the database it protects. That guards against a stray backup or synced folder, but not against anyone who can read the data directory.

The key is per instance. A web app in a container and a terminal tool on the host generate different ones, so they cannot read each other’s saved secrets even pointed at the same volume — set SecretKey to the same value in both if you want them to, or move connections with a passphrase-encrypted bundle, which is what it is for.

From an Aspire AppHost, WithSecretKey takes a parameter, which is the supported way to pass one without putting it in the compose file.

Read-only

ReadOnly blocks every write path for every host-provided connection, which is the setting you want whenever the tool is pointed at something you didn’t create five minutes ago. Individual saved connections carry their own flag — see read-only connections for exactly what it closes.

Disable AI

DisableAi removes the assistant entirely — no tab, no settings link, and the services aren’t registered at all, so the routes refuse to render rather than being merely unlinked.

Demo mode

DemoMode turns the whole app into a public playground — see Demo mode. It forces both ReadOnly and DisableAi on.

Frame ancestors

Blazor’s interactive server render mode blocks embedding by default, sending both Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' and X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN. That is the right default here: a page that can read and write your databases should not be loadable into someone else’s.

FrameAncestors opts out. Its value becomes the frame-ancestors policy verbatim — or any (equivalently *) to allow every embedder — and the X-Frame-Options header is dropped alongside, since that one has no directive to relax and would otherwise block the embed on its own.

The Docker Desktop extension is what this exists for: it sets any on the container it creates so the app can render inside its tab. Leave it unset for anything reachable beyond your own machine — giving up clickjacking protection on a tool with no authentication in front of it is not a trade worth making.

Safety

There is no authentication in this tool. It is a database client, and it assumes the network in front of it is doing the access control — put it behind whatever you’d put a database admin console behind.

What it does defend against:

Destructive clicks. Deleting a connection and bulk-deleting documents each take two clicks. Passwords are masked wherever a connection string is displayed.

Other people’s bytes. Blob payloads come from whoever wrote the document, so serving them from our own origin is a real XSS surface. Every response carries nosniff and a default-src 'none' CSP, and anything not on the short raster-image allowlist is sent as an attachment rather than rendered — SVG deliberately included, because it’s a document format that can carry script. Document values are HTML-escaped everywhere they’re rendered.

A quietly wrong audit trail. Writes to a temporal-mapped type record a version, stamped with the actor shiny-docdb-myadmin — see History.

Secrets in an export. The connection bundle leaves secrets out by default, and encrypts them under a passphrase you type when you opt in.

The SQL console is an open prompt

There is no statement allow-list. Give the tool a database account with the privileges you actually want it to have — that account, not the read-only checkbox, is the boundary that matters.