Introduction

Decrypt Hiera YAML values encrypted with GPG.

Background

Inspiration for this project came from hiera-gpg. But hiera_yamlgpg gives you more flexibility:

• hiera_yamlgpg decrypts just the values inside yaml files whereas hiera-gpg requires that the entire file is encrypted.
• hiera_yamlgpg is a puppet module, hiera-gpg is a ruby gem.
• hiera_yamlgpg will only decrypt values that look like they've been encrypted and will treat unencrypted values just as the normal yaml backend would.
• hiera_yamlgpg will deep dive into hashes and arrays and only attempt to decrypt values that are strings.

This means a contributor doesn't need your private key to add a new encrypted parameter to a yaml file. The yaml file itself is unencrypted, only the values are encrypted. A contributor only needs a public key to add a new encrypted value. It also means one can have lists of encrypted values, lists of hashes of encrypted values, lists of hashes with both encrypted and unencrypted values, and any number of levels of such.

Installation

The package is distributed as a puppet module on puppet forge, if you already have puppet installed, the module can be installed with:

puppet module install compete/hiera_yamlgpg

The only requirement is that gpgme is installed:

gem install gpgme

Use

TLDR:

(You already have public/private gpg keys set up, you know what you're doing, you just want to use it.)

Add yamlgpg to your hiera :backends. Specify a :key_dir under the :yamlgpg section that points to a GnuPG directory (defaults to ~/.gnupg). This backend will process files ending in .yaml. Use ascii armor encrypted text (encrypted with the pubkey portion of a secret key available under :key_dir) in the values of any yaml entry and they will be decrypted on the fly by hiera.

Details:

On your puppet master or one of your puppet nodes, create a public and private key with:

gpg --gen-key --homedir /etc/puppet/keys

or, if using puppet enterprise

gpg --gen-key --homedir /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/keys

Use a name for the key that's something like your puppet master's fqdn. Don't supply a password, gpg might complain about this a lot, but just keep hitting enter when asked to supply a password. Hiera won't be able to decrypt your values if you use a password here. Export the newly created pubkey with:

gpg --export KEY-NAME --homedir /etc/puppet/keys \
  > exported-pubring.gpg

Copy exported-pubring.gpg to your loal dev machine and import it into your personal keyring with:

gpg --import exported-pubring.gpg

The private key (secring.pub) should only reside on your puppet masters, or if need be, distributed to your puppet servers if not running in master/agent mode.

Then create a yaml file hieradata/secrets.yaml from an existing unencrypted yaml file, such as hieradata/unencrypted_secrets.yaml as:

cat hieradata/unencrypted_secrets.yaml \
  | ./scripts/encrypt_yaml.rb -r KEY-NAME \
  > hieradata/secrets.yaml

The above command will go through all the keys in the supplied yaml file and write out a new yaml file with only encrypted values.

You can also encrypt individual text by running something like the following:

echo -n 'secretdbpassword' \
  | gpg --armor --encrypt -r KEY-NAME \

And then pasting the output of the above into a yaml file so it looks like:

dbpassword: |
  [PASTE THE OUTPUT OF gpg --armor --encrypt HERE]
  [MAKE SURE TO INDENT EACH LINE THE SAME AMOUNT]

notsecretthing: blah

Make a hiera.yaml as:

:hierarchy:
  - secrets

:backends:
  - yamlgpg

:yamlgpg:
  :datadir: hieradata
  :key_dir: /etc/puppet/keys # optional, defaults to ~/.gnupg
  :fail_on_error: true       # optional, defaults to false

Then if you run hiera -c hiera.yaml dbpassword on a machine that has the secret key you should get secretdbpassword. You'll need to be root to read the keydir, and hiera_yamlgpg will need to be in your ruby library search path, so the command might end up looking like this:

sudo bash -c 'RUBYLIB=/etc/puppet/modules/hiera_yamlgpg/lib hiera -c hiera.yaml dbpassword'

When you use hiera as part of puppet, that path should already be on the load path, and the process will be running as root.

By default, yamlgpg will print a warning and continue if there are any errors with decryption. But you can set :fail_on_error to true to raise an exception when there are problems.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0

Contact

swillis@compete.com

Support

Please log tickets and issues at our Projects site