Django Secret Key Generator

What Django uses SECRET_KEY for

Django uses SECRET_KEY to sign session cookies, password reset tokens, messages and anything passed through its signing framework. If it leaks, an attacker can forge those signatures. If it changes, existing sessions and reset links stop working.

This generator uses the same character set and length as Django’s own get_random_secret_key(): 50 characters from lowercase letters, digits and the symbols !@#$%^&*(-_=+). That gives about 282 bits of entropy.

Keep it out of settings.py

Load the key from the environment instead of committing it to your repository:

import os
SECRET_KEY = os.environ["DJANGO_SECRET_KEY"]

Choose the .env output to get a line you can paste into an environment file. The value is wrapped in single quotes because characters like $ and # have special meaning in shells and dotenv parsers.

Frequently asked questions