ytkubevault

ytkubevault is a light wrapper of abilities to read secrets from HashiCorp Vault running in Kubernetes.

When the microservice needs to fetch the secret value from Vault, it has to read a token from its containing pod first. Then this token is used to communicate with Vault in order to obtain a second token. Your service uses the second token to get the secrets. ytkubevault simplifies this process with one function get_secret_or_env(key: default:), which first tries to obtain the secret from Vault, and if that didn't succeed, reads it from the environment. A default value can be provided as the last resort.

This is especially convenient when you are developing locally, or the application is being built in a CI/CD pipeline where the first token is not available.

Install

pip install ytkubevault

Usage

First define the following environment variables:

• VAULT_ENABLED
• VAULT_ROLE
• VAULT_URL
• VAULT_SECRETS_PATH

By default, VAULT_ENABLED is "false". To enable reading from Vault, set it to be "true", case-insensitive. And then,

from ytkubevault import get_secret_or_env

db_password = get_secret_or_env("DATABASE_PASSWORD")

Since Version 0.2.0, a VaultClient is added, and you can explicitly create such a client:

from ytkubevault import VaultClient

vault_client = VaultClient()
# login first
try:
    vault_client.login()
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Failed to login: {e}")

# Then you can do encryption, for example:
vault_client.encrypt(encrypt_key="some_key", plaintext="my_secret_message")

The old functions now use an implicitly created global VaultClient. Note that VaultClient is not multithread-safe.

Fetching secrets from outside the cluster

To be able to fetch secrets from outside the Kubernetes cluster, you need to install the package with

pip install 'ytkubevault[dev]'

This will also install kubernetes package, which allows us to get the service account token. Additionally, 4 environment variables need to be set:

• VAULT_DEV_REMOTE_MODE: this needs to be true, which is false by default
• VAULT_DEV_REMOTE_CLUSTER: the cluster string you want to connect to
• VAULT_DEV_REMOTE_NAMESPACE: the namespace the service is in
• VAULT_DEV_REMOTE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT: the service account name of the service