Binding credentials in Cloud Foundry

A bindable service returns credentials that an application can consume in response to the cf bind API call. Cloud Foundry writes these credentials to the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable. In some cases, buildpacks can write a subset of these credentials to other environment variables that frameworks might need.

Choose from the following list of credential fields if possible, though you can provide additional fields as needed. Refer to the Using Bound Services section of the Managing Service Instances with the CLI topic for information about how these credentials are consumed.

If you provide a service that supports a connection string, provide the uri key for buildpacks and application libraries to use.

CREDENTIALS	DESCRIPTION
uri	Connection string of the form DB-TYPE://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOSTNAME:PORT/NAME, where DB-TYPE is a type of database such as mysql, postgres, mongodb, or amqp.
hostname	FQDN of the server host
port	Port of the server host
name	Name of the service instance
vhost	Name of the messaging server virtual host - a replacement for a name specific to AMQP providers
username	Server user
password	Server password

The following is an example output of ENV['VCAP_SERVICES'].

Depending on the types of databases you are using, each database might return different credentials.

VCAP_SERVICES=
{
  cleardb: [
    {
      name: "cleardb-1",
      label: "cleardb",
      plan: "spark",
      credentials: {
        name: "ad_c6f4446532610ab",
        hostname: "us-cdbr-east-03.cleardb.com",
        port: "3306",
        username: "b5d435f40dd2b2",
        password: "ebfc00ac",
        uri: "mysql://b5d435f40dd2b2:[email protected]:3306/ad_c6f4446532610ab",
        jdbcUrl: "jdbc:mysql://b5d435f40dd2b2:[email protected]:3306/ad_c6f4446532610ab"
      }
    }
  ],
  cloudamqp: [
    {
      name: "cloudamqp-6",
      label: "cloudamqp",
      plan: "lemur",
      credentials: {
        uri: "amqp://ksvyjmiv:[email protected]/ksvyjmiv"
      }
    }
    {
      name: "cloudamqp-9dbc6",
      label: "cloudamqp",
      plan: "lemur",
      credentials: {
        uri: "amqp://vhuklnxa:[email protected]/vhuklnxa"
      }
    }
  ],
  rediscloud: [
    {
      name: "rediscloud-1",
      label: "rediscloud",
      plan: "20mb",
      credentials: {
        port: "6379",
        host: "pub-redis-6379.us-east-1-2.3.ec2.redislabs.com",
        password: "1M5zd3QfWi9nUyya"
      }
    },
  ],
}