django-vault-helpers 0.5.0

Helper functionality for obtaining secrets and credentials from Hashicorp Vault in a Django project

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.

Environment Variable	Description
VAULT_URL	Required. The URL of the Vault API. For example, https://vault:8200/.
VAULT_CACERT	Optional. File path to the Vault CA certificate.
VAULT_SKIP_VERIFY	Optional. Set to disable validation of Vault’s SSL cert.
VAULT_DEBUG	Optional. Enable Vault debug logging.

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

Environment Variable	Description
VAULT_TOKEN	Token for Vault Token authentication
VAULT_APPID, VAULT_USERID	App-ID authentication
VAULT_ROLEID, VAULT_SECRETID	App-Role authentication
VAULT_SSLCERT, VAULT_SSLKEY	SSL Client Cert authentication

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.

Environment Variable	Description
VAULT_DATABASE_PATH	Vault path to read from when fetching database credentials. For example, database/creds/myapplication.
DATABASE_URL	Database connection string, sans the username and password. For example, postgres://mydb:5432/myapplication.
DATABASE_OWNERROLE	For PostgreSQL, the name of the role to assume after connecting using SET ROLE

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.

Environment Variable	Description
VAULT_AWS_PATH	Vault path to read from when fetching AWS credentials. For example, aws/sts/myapplication.

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

0.5.0

• 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.