# Protecting an application

If you run a wolkenkit application this also includes running multiple infrastructure services, such as databases and message queues. To avoid running these services without password protection, the CLI creates a random key and prints it to the terminal when starting an application.

You may need to provide the key manually. For that, provide it using the --shared-key flag when starting the application:

$ wolkenkit start --shared-key <secret>

# Storing the shared key

For security reasons, you can't store the shared key in the application's package.json file. Anyway, if you don't want to provide it every single time you start the application, set the environment variable WOLKENKIT_SHARED_KEY to the key that you want to use:

$ export WOLKENKIT_SHARED_KEY=<secret>