Django Vault Helpers

This is a helper library with the goal of making it easier to retrieve secrets from Hasicorp Vault from a Django project.

Installation

Install django-vault-helpers from pip.

$ pip install django-vault-helpers

Add the new packages to your installed apps.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'vaulthelpers',
    ...
]

Authenticating to Vault

Configure connection settings using environment variables to authenticate to Vault.

In addition to the settings above, you must provide environment variables for one of the authentication methods below.

Database Connection Secrets

To use Vault to load database connection configuration and credentials, configure the Vault database secret backend as described in the Database secret backend documentation. For example:

$ vault mount database
Successfully mounted 'database' at 'database'!
$ CONNECTION_NAME='myapplication'
$ CONNECTION_URL='postgresql://vaultuser:FOO@mydb:5432/myapplication'
$ PARENT_ROLE_NAME='myapplication'
$ vault write "database/config/$CONNECTION_NAME" \
        plugin_name="postgresql-database-plugin" \
        allowed_roles="$CONNECTION_NAME" \
        connection_url="$CONNECTION_URL"
$ vault write "database/roles/$CONNECTION_NAME" \
        db_name="$CONNECTION_NAME" \
        creation_statements="CREATE ROLE \"{{name}}\" WITH LOGIN ENCRYPTED PASSWORD '{{password}}' VALID UNTIL '{{expiration}}' IN ROLE \"${PARENT_ROLE_NAME}\" INHERIT NOCREATEROLE NOCREATEDB NOSUPERUSER NOREPLICATION;" \
        default_ttl="1h" \
        max_ttl="24h"

Next, add settings via the following environment variables.

Finally, edit your projects settings.py file to load database configuration using Vault.

import vaulthelpers

# Load database credentials from Vault
DATABASES = {
    'default': vaulthelpers.database.get_config(),
}

To add additional keys to the database configuration, pass in a dictionary to the get_config call. For example:

import vaulthelpers

# Load database credentials from Vault
DATABASES = {
    'default': vaulthelpers.database.get_config({
        'ATOMIC_REQUESTS': True,
        'CONN_MAX_AGE': 3600,
    }),
}

AWS Credentials

To use Vault to load IAM or STS credentials for AWS, configure the Vault AWS secret backend as described in the AWS secret backend documentation.

$ vault mount aws
Successfully mounted 'aws' at 'aws'!
$ vault write aws/config/root \
        access_key=AKIAJWVN5Z4FOFT7NLNA \
        secret_key=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 \
        region=us-east-1
$ vault write aws/roles/myapplication \
        arn=arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT-ID-WITHOUT-HYPHENS:role/MyApplicationRoleName

Next, add settings via the following environment variables.

Finally, configure you Django project to load AWS credentials using Vault. To do this, edit the settings.py file to include the following line.

import vaulthelpers

# Load AWS credentials from Vault
vaulthelpers.aws.init_boto3_credentials()

This will override the credential resolve code in boto3 and botocore so that it will fetch credentials from Vault instead of the usual means, like environment variables or the EC2 metadata service.

Direct HVAC Client Access

To directly access the authentication hvac client connector, fetch it from the vaulthelpers.common module.

import vaulthelpers

vault_auth = vaulthelpers.common.get_vault_auth()
verify = vaulthelpers.common.VAULT_CACERT or vaulthelpers.common.VAULT_SSL_VERIFY
vcl = vault_auth.authenticated_client(vaulthelpers.common.VAULT_URL, verify=verify)
result = vcl.read('secret/data/apps/myaplication')
print(result)

Changelog

0.6.0

• Add support for Django 2.1
• Add support for Python 3.7
• Migrate from Sentry's old SDK (raven) to their new SDK (sentry-sdk).

0.5.0

• Cache database and AWS credentials on the file system so that a multi-threaded / multi-process system doesn't need separate credentials for each process and thread.
• Improve security by setting the file permissions of all cache files (vault token, AWS, database) to only be readable by the owner.

0.4.2

• Fix Django 2.0 Deprecation warnings.

0.4.1

• Fix bug with SET ROLE when using the PostGIS database wrapper.

0.4.0

• Fix bug with Database credential fetch code when a lease appears to still be valid but isn't, due to it's parent token getting revoked.
• Added tests for database and AWS components.
• Dropped dependencies on 12factor-vault and django-postgresql-setrole. When upgrading to this version, it is recommended to uninstall these packages.

0.3.3

• Fix bug in with passing url parameter to HVAC client in common.EnvironmentConfig
• Improve testing.
• Support Django 2.0

0.3.2

• Prevent recycling TCP connections after forking a process.

0.3.1

• Fixed TCP connection issue by caching VaultAuthenticator instance in thread local storage.

0.3.0

• Add file system caching of vault tokens.

0.2.0

• Add S3 storage backend based on storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage.

0.1.0

• Initial release.