Connections

A connection is a provider, a connection string and a name. There is no user management and no server administration here: the tool connects with the credentials you give it and does exactly what that account is allowed to do.

Where connections come from

Saved in the tool. + Connection takes a provider, a connection string and a name, and writes it to the tool’s own store in the data directory. Secret-bearing parts — the connection string and any SQLCipher key — are encrypted at rest with AES-GCM under the secret key.

Uploaded. SQLite, SQLCipher and DuckDB are files, so you can upload one instead of typing a path. It lands in <data>/uploads/<profile-id>/ and is treated like any other connection afterwards.

Declared by the host. Anything the environment supplies as a ConnectionStrings:{name} + Shiny:DocumentDb:{name}:Provider pair is picked up at startup and shown under a from host badge. These are never written to the tool’s own store — they live in memory for as long as the process does — and they can’t be edited or deleted from the UI, because they’re declared somewhere else and that’s where they change. This is the mechanism the Aspire integration uses.

A connection string with no matching provider key is ignored, so a Redis or blob reference in the same environment doesn’t turn into a junk connection.

Read-only connections

Any connection can be marked read-only, and ShinyDocDbMyAdmin:ReadOnly marks every host-provided one at once — the setting you want whenever the tool is pointed at something you didn’t create five minutes ago.

Read-only blocks every write path: no insert, edit, duplicate or delete, no import, no index create or drop, no sidecar rebuild, and non-SELECT statements are refused in the SQL console. Exporting still works, because it only reads.

The flag is enforced below the UI rather than by hiding buttons, so a deep link to a write page produces a refusal instead of a form that fails on submit.

Testing a connection

Test opens the connection and closes it, reporting the provider’s own error when it can’t. It is the fastest way to find out whether a container can actually reach the host you named — which, for a tool that lives inside Docker, is the failure worth catching first.

Import / export the connection list

Moves the connection list — with each connection’s saved queries and assistant settings — between instances, as plain JSON you can read, diff and edit before importing.

Secrets are left out by default. A connection string is a credential, and an export that carries them is a credential file — which is exactly what you don’t want to drop in a ticket, a chat or a repository. The default bundle says which connections exist and how they’re configured; whoever imports it supplies the secrets.

Tick the box and they travel, encrypted under a passphrase you type — deliberately not this instance’s own key, which would make the file useless anywhere but the machine that wrote it, the one place an export isn’t needed. PBKDF2-SHA256 stretches the passphrase, AES-GCM encrypts each value, and the salt is fresh per export so the same passphrase never produces the same key twice. There is no recovery: without the passphrase the file cannot be opened.

Importing never writes until you’ve seen what it would do. The review screen lists every connection in the file, whether one already exists by that id or name, and what will happen to it — defaulting to skip for anything already there, add for anything new. A wrong passphrase is caught before the first write rather than halfway through.

Host-provided connections are not exported: they’re declared by an AppHost or by configuration, so they’re not this instance’s to hand out, and an import would produce something the target couldn’t edit either. Uploaded database files aren’t in the bundle — a database isn’t a setting.

Switched off entirely in demo mode.

Deleting a connection

Two clicks, and it removes the profile plus its saved queries and assistant settings. An uploaded database file goes with it; a server database obviously does not.