Create GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS json file

Hi there,

I’m trying to properly setup “GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS” (https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/getting-started) in my droplet. I’ve currently added the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS as an environment variable. Its value is the content of the json key file (containing credentials to verify usage of a Google Service), which is required to start the application.

On startup this environment variable is recognized, but Google needs the value to be an actual json file instead. A simple solution would be to add the key file to my repo and link the environment variable to that file. This is however unsafe.

Is there a way to generate a json file on startup, which contains the value I put in the environment variable? This is a solution which appears to work in Heroku (https://github.com/elishaterada/heroku-google-application-credentials-buildpack/issues/2#issuecomment-580212700), but I haven’t found something similar in Digital Ocean.

Of course any solution is welcome, as long as I don’t have to commit my json file to a repo.

Thanks!