hiera-eyaml-gpg

GPG encryption backend for the hiera-eyaml module.

Motivation

The default PKCS#7 encryption scheme used by hiera-eyaml is perfect if only simple encryption and decryption is needed.

However, if you are in a sizable team it helps to encrypt and decrypt data with multiple keys. This means that each team member can hold their own private key and so can the puppetmaster. Equally, each puppet master can have their own key if desired and when you need to rotate keys for either users or puppet masters, re-encrypting your files and changing the key everywhere does not need to be done in lockstep.

Requirements

You'll need a working GPG setup with your own keypair and a public keyring containing any other keys that you want to work

To get started, install the hiera-eyaml-gpg gem.

$ gem install hiera-eyaml-gpg

You will also need to install either the gpgme (recommended) or ruby_gpg gem:

$ gem install gpgme

OR

$ gem install ruby_gpg -v ">=0.3.1"

Note: you will need to use ruby_gpg with the Puppet server as it uses JRuby which cannot make use of native extensions such as gpgme.

If you haven't already installed it, this requires and will install the hiera-eyaml gem, which you should probably acquint yourself with at https://github.com/TomPoulton/hiera-eyaml.

Note that in order to install the gpgme gem you'll need to have the ruby development package installed for your distribution.

How to use

Encrypting and editing encrypted data

Once installed you can create encrypted hiera-eyaml blocks that are encrypted using GPG.

$ eyaml encrypt -n gpg -s "A secret string to encrypt" --gpg-recipients [email protected],[email protected]

If you do not have a web of trust (i.e. you normally use --always-trust for gpg signing) then you'll need to use the --gpg-always-trust option on the command line.

It gets pretty dull to keep on remembering which recipients you should use, so you can put them in a file and specify that instead.

$ eyaml encrypt -n gpg -s "A secret string to encrypt" --gpg-recipients-file hiera-eyaml-gpg.recipients

In fact, when editing a file on disk and neither of the --gpg-recipient options are provided it will automatically look for a hiera-eyaml-gpg.recipients file in the same directory as the file being edited (or any parent in the tree). The first file discovered will be used allowing different parts of a hiera tree to have different recipients if so desired.

Use eyaml --help for more details or look at the hiera-eyaml docs.

Configuring hiera

Assuming you have a working hiera and hiera-eyaml then the only option you need to add is to configure :gpg_gnupghome: in your hiera.yaml (under the :eyaml: section). This should be the directory that contains the keyring etc for the user that can to decrypt the hiera data. Please note that the private GPG key must not have a passphrase.

Authors

• Simon Hildrew - Initial code
• Geoff Meakins - Created hiera-eyaml plugin framework that made this possible

Contributors

• Walt Javins - Bug fixes