During development, you most likely to have database secret or AI secret that you don't want to save and commit into git repo. Storing in appsetting is a default setting, but you always forget to remove it when you commit you code. The best approach is to use Secret Manager which is a tool that come with dotnet core SDK and it help keep your secrets local.
Init Project
If your project is new, you need to initialize it first with this command once.
dotnet user-secrets init
Set secret
For each secret you want to keep local, use this command:
dotnet user-secrets set "AIConfig:OpenAI:APIKey" "12345"
For the above example command, APIKey field in OpenAI section of AIConfig will be saved locally and it's available at runtime when the app start.
List all secrets
To see available secrets in your projects. Use this command within the project directory: