pass secrets operator

A Kubernetes operator to sync and decrypt secrets from a password store (pass) Git repository.

While this approach to secrets management on Kubernetes is more technically challenging, the primary advantage is that we don't have to rely on a 3rd party SaaS platform, such as Vault, Infisical or Doppler, to hold and secure our secrets. This approach upholds a GitOps-style of secrets management by storing encrypted secret state in Git.

Moreover, this operator may be used in an airgapped environment or private subnets (with no outbound Internet access) when paired with any self-hosted git repository that supports SSH access, so your secrets never leave your network.

How it works

From a high level, this operator runs git pull on an interval to grab updates from a git repository populated with encrypted secrets by pass on a local developer's machine. It maps secrets' paths to data values through the application of a PassSecret, a custom resource, such as the following.

apiVersion: secrets.premiscale.com/v1alpha1
kind: PassSecret
metadata:
  name: mypasssecret
  namespace: pass-operator-test
spec:
  encryptedData:
    mykey: premiscale/mydata
  managedSecret:
    metadata:
      name: mysecret
      namespace: mynamespace
    type: Opaque
    immutable: false

The above PassSecret manifest translates to the following Secret.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: mysecret
  namespace: mynamespace
stringData:
  mykey: <decrypted contents of premiscale/mydata>
immutable: false
type: Opaque

The following flowchart outlines how this operator reacts to PassSecret-related events and pass store updates.

Installation

See the chart README for an overview of operator installation and configuration options.

Development

Unit tests

Run unit tests with

yarn test:unit

End-to-end tests

Run e2e tests against a live (local) environment with

yarn test:e2e

This command will

1. Stand up a local 1-node minikube cluster with 4 cores, 4GiB memory and 30GiB storage. (Modify ./scripts/minikube.sh if these resources are unsuitable for your local development environment.)
2. Create a localhost docker registry redirect container.
3. Build both e2e (hosts a git repository with encrypted pass secrets that match paths found in ./src/test/data/crd) and operator container images, as well as push these images to the local redirect for minikube to access.
4. Installs both e2e and pass-operator Helm charts.
5. Run e2e tests.
6. Tear down the cluster and local registry, as well as cleans up locally-built artifacts.

Coverage

Test coverage against the codebase with

poetry run coverage run -m pytest
poetry run coverage report -m pytest