Ease collaboration on your Chef kitchen's secrets by storing the data online, for example in private Gists.

The principal use case for this gem is when you use Chef Solo. In this case there is no Chef Server instance where users can go and edit secrets via a web interface. If you want to edit secrets, you have to check out the kitchen's repo, obtain a copy of the secret_file and edit the data bag.

chef-encrypted-data-bag-url allows you to create a secret file (for example a Gist or a GitLab snippet) and use that file as your source of secrets.

You can edit your secret using your web browser and then re-run chef deploy.

With this gem, you create a private Gist (or any other online secret file) and write your secrets in JSON format, e.g.:

{
  "foo_api_token": "new_value",
  "database": {
    "password": "secret"
  }
}

then put the URL of the raw Gist data in your encrypted data bag:

{
  "id": "ciao",
  "data_url": "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myuser/f95499c75cbe04f8cd7c42732729167d24928009/secrets.json",
  "foo_api_token": "old_value"
}

chef_gem "chef-encrypted-data-bag-url" do
  compile_time true
end

require "chef/encrypted_data_bag_url"

node.default["foo"]["bar"] = Chef::EncryptedDataBagUrl.load("secrets", "fred").to_hash

In your Chef cookbooks, instead of using Chef::EncryptedDataBagItem.load("foo", "bar").to_hash to load your data, you use Chef::EncryptedDataBagUrl.load("foo", "bar").to_hash.

The result is a deep merge of the data in the data bag itself with the data from the supplied URL:

{
  "id": "ciao",
  "data_url": "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myuser/f95499c75cbe04f8cd7c42732729167d24928009/secrets.json",
  "foo_api_token": "new_value",
  "database": {
    "password": "secret"
  }
}

Note that data bag contents are treated as defaults, and the data URL contents override matching values (as in the example of foo_api_token above).

Unfortunately, until you actually install the gem, chef why-run will fail with:

LoadError
---------
cannot load such file -- chef/encrypted_data_bag_url

Gist raw URLS are versioned. Every time you change the contents of the Gist, and click on the 'Raw' link you get a URL like this:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myuser/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa/raw/bbbbbbb/gistfile1.txt

You can get a permalink to the latest version like this:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myuser/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa/raw/gistfile1.txt

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/joeyates/chef-encrypted-data-bag-url. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.