chef-vault Cookbook

This cookbook is responsible for installing the chef-vault gem and providing some helper methods to load encrypted data bags that are in The Vault. It also provides a resource that can be used to store secrets as a Chef Vault item in a recipe.

Chef Vault is a library originally written by Nordstrom's infrastructure operations team that helps manage encrypted data bags.

• https://github.com/chef/chef-vault

Requirements

This cookbook should work on any system/platform that is supported by Chef.

This cookbook is specifically tested on Ubuntu and CentOS platforms using Test Kitchen. See .kitchen.yml for platforms and test suites.

The helper methods in this cookbook use the Chef Vault v2 API, so the default version will match ~> 2.2 to ensure a reasonably updated version of the gem is installed.

Helper Methods

This cookbook provides a nice helper method for the Chef Recipe DSL so you can write:

chef_vault_item("secrets", "dbpassword")

Instead of:

ChefVault::Item.load("secrets", "dbpassword")

This has logic in place to fall back to using data bags if the desired item isn't encrypted. If the vault item fails to load because of missing vault metadata (a vaultname_keys data bag), then chef_vault_item will attempt to load the specified item as a regular Data Bag Item with Chef::DataBagItem.load. This is intended to be used only for testing, and not as a fall back to avoid issues loading encrypted items.

This cookbook also provides a handy wrapper if you are storing multiple environment settings within your encrypted items. Using this following helper:

item = chef_vault_item_for_environment('secrets', 'passwords')

Instead of (or any combination of such expression):

item = chef_vault_item('secrets', 'passwords')[node.chef_environment]

In addition, you can list the items in a vault using the chef_vault() method. It is advised to use this method instead of data_bag(), because the latter returns the keys in addition to the items themselves. This method prevents you from having to parse out the keys.

items = chef_vault('secrets')
item = chef_vault_item('secrets',item[0])

Attributes

• node['chef-vault']['version'] - Specify a version of the chef-vault gem if required. Default is ~> 2.2, as that version was used for testing.

Resources

chef_vault_secret

The chef_vault_secret resource can be used in recipes to store secrets in Chef Vault items. Where possible and relevant, this resource attempts to map behavior and functionality to the knife vault sub-commands.

Actions

The actions generally map to the knife vault sub-commands, with an exception that create does an update, because the resource enforces declarative state. To get the knife vault create behavior, use create_if_missing.

• :create - Default action. Creates the item, or updates it if it already exists.
• :create_if_missing - Calls the create action unless it exists.
• :delete - Deletes the item and the item's keys ("id"_keys).

Attributes

• id - Name attribute. The name of the data bag item.
• data_bag - Required. The data bag that contains the item.
• admins - A list of admin users who should have access to the item. Corresponds to the "admin" option when using the chef-vault knife plugin. Can be specified as a comma separated string or an array. See examples, below.
• clients - A search query for the nodes' API clients that should have access to the item.
• search - Search query that would match the same used for the clients, gets stored as a field in the item.
• raw_data - The raw data, as a Ruby Hash, that will be stored in the item. See examples, below.

At least one of admins or clients should be specified, otherwise nothing will have access to the item.

Examples

From the test cookbook embedded in this repository.

chef_vault_secret 'clean-energy' do
  data_bag 'green'
  raw_data({'auth' => 'Forged in a mold'})
  admins 'hydroelectric'
  search '*:*'
end

Assuming that the green data bag exists, this will create the clean-energy item as a ChefVault encrypted item, which also creates clean-energy_keys that has the list of admins, clients, and the shared secrets. For example, the content looks like this in plaintext:

{
  "id": "clean-energy",
  "auth": {
    "encrypted_data": "y+l7H4okLu4wisryCaIT+7XeAgomcdgFo3v3p6RKWnXvgvimdzjFGMUfdGId\nq+pP\n",
    "iv": "HLr0uyy9BrieTDmS0TbbmA==\n",
    "version": 1,
    "cipher": "aes-256-cbc"
  }
}

And the encrypted data decrypted using the specified client:

$ knife vault show green clean-energy -z -u hydroelectric -k clients/hydroelectric.pem
auth: Forged in a mold
id:   clean-energy

Another example, showing multiple admins allowed access to an item using a comma-separated string, or an array:

chef_vault_secret 'root-password' do
  admins 'jtimberman,paulmooring'
  data_bag 'secrets'
  raw_data({'auth' => 'DontUseThisPasswordForRoot'})
  search '*:*'
end
chef_vault_secret 'root-password' do
  admins ['jtimberman', 'paulmooring']
  data_bag 'secrets'
  raw_data({'auth' => 'DontUseThisPasswordForRoot'})
  search '*:*'
end

Internally, the provider will convert the admins array to a comma-delimited string.

When using the chef_vault_secret resource, the data_bag must exist first. If it doesn't, you can create it in your recipe with a ruby_block:

begin
  data_bag('secrets')
rescue
  ruby_block "create-data_bag-secrets" do
    block do
      Chef::DataBag.validate_name!('secrets')
      databag = Chef::DataBag.new
      databag.name('secrets')
      databag.save
    end
    action :create
  end
end

Or, use the cheffish gem, which provides resources for Chef objects (nodes, roles, data bags, etc):

chef_data_bag 'secrets'

Note that there is a bug in versions of cheffish prior to 0.5.beta.3. Also, cheffish requires the openssl-pkcs8 gem, which has C extensions, so openssl development headers and C build tools need to be installed. To use this, you can create a recipe like the one in the test cookbook.

Usage

Include the recipe before using the Chef Vault library in recipes.

include_recipe 'chef-vault'
secret_stuff = ChefVault::Item.load("secrets", "a_secret")

Or, use the helper library method:

secret_stuff = chef_vault_item("secrets", "a_secret")

If you need a specific version of the chef-vault RubyGem, then specify it with the attribute, node['chef-vault']['version'].

To use the chef_vault_secret resource in your cookbooks' recipes, declare a dependency on this cookbook, and then use the resource as described in the Examples above.

Contributing

This repository contains a CONTRIBUTING file that describes the contribution process for Chef cookbooks.

License and Authors

• Author: Joshua Timberman joshua@chef.io
• Copyright (c) 2013 Opscode, Inc. legal@opscode.com
• Copyright (c) 2014-2015 Chef Software, Inc. legal@chef.io
• Copyright (c) 2014, 2015 Bloomberg Finance L.P.

License:: Apache License, Version 2.0

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.