vsh

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vsh

vsh is an interactive HashiCorp Vault shell which treats paths and keys like directories and files. Key features are:

• recursive operations on paths with cp, mv or rm
• term search with grep
• transparency towards differences between KV1 and KV2, i.e., you can freely move/copy secrets between both
• non-interactive mode for automation (vsh -c "<cmd>")
• merging keys with different strategies through append

Supported commands

mv <from-path> <to-path>
cp <from-path> <to-path>
append <from-secret> <to-secret> [flag]
rm <dir-path or filel-path>
ls <dir-path // optional>
grep <search-term> <path>
cd <dir-path>
cat <file-path>

cp, rm and grep command always have the -r/-R flag implied, i.e., every operation works recursively.

append

Append operation reads secrets from <from-secret> and merges it to <to-secret>. The <to-secret> will be created with a placeholder value if it does not exists. Both <from-secret> and <to-secret> must be leaves (path cannot end with /).

By default, append does not overwrite secrets if the <to-secret> already contains a key. The default behavior can be explicitly set using flag: -s or --skip. Example:

> cat /secret/from

fruit=apple
vegetable=tomato

> cat /secret/to

fruit=pear
tree=oak

> append /secret/from /secret/to -s

> cat /secret/to

fruit=pear
vegetable=tomato
tree=oak

Setting flag -f or --force will cause the conflicting keys from the <to-secret> to be overwritten with keys from the <from-secret>. Example:

> cat /secret/from

fruit=apple
vegetable=tomato

> cat /secret/to

fruit=pear
tree=oak

> append /secret/from /secret/to -f

> cat /secret/to

fruit=apple
vegetable=tomato
tree=oak

Setting flag -r or --rename will cause the conflicting keys from the <to-secret> to be kept as they are. Instead the keys from the <from-secret> will be stored under a renamed key. Example:

> cat /secret/from

fruit=apple
vegetable=tomato

> cat /secret/to

fruit=pear
tree=oak

> append /secret/from /secret/to -r

> cat /secret/to

fruit=pear
fruit_1=apple
vegetable=tomato
tree=oak

grep

grep recursively searches the given term in key and value pairs. It does not support regex. If you are looking for copies or just trying to find the path to a certain term, this command might come in handy.

Setting the vault token

In order to get a valid token, vsh uses vault's TokenHelper mechanism (github.com/hashicorp/vault/command/config). That means vsh supports setting vault tokens via ~/.vault-token, VAULT_TOKEN and external token_helper.

Secret Backend Discovery

vsh attempts to reliably discover all available backends. Ideally, the vault token used by vsh has list permissions on sys/mount. If this is not the case, then vsh does not know the available backends beforehand. That means initially there won't be path auto-completion on the top (backend) level. However, vsh will try with best-effort strategy to reliably determine the kv version of every entered path.

Interactive mode

export VAULT_ADDR=http://localhost:8080
export VAULT_TOKEN=root
export VAULT_PATH=secret/  # VAULT_PATH is optional
./vsh
http://localhost:8080 /secret/>

Note: the given token is used for auto-completion, i.e., List() queries are done with that token, even if you do not rm or mv anything. vsh caches List() results to reduce the amount of queries. However, after execution of each command the cache is cleared in order to do accurate tab-completion. If your token has a limited number of uses, then consider using the non-interactive mode to avoid auto-completion queries.

Toggle auto-completion

To reduce the number of queries against vault, you can disable path auto-completion in 2 ways:

1. Disable at start time:

./vsh --disable-auto-completion

1. Toggle inside interactive mode:

./vsh
http://localhost:8080 /secret/> toggle-auto-completion
Use path auto-completion: false
http://localhost:8080 /secret/> toggle-auto-completion
Use path auto-completion: true

Non-interactive mode

export VAULT_ADDR=<addr>
export VAULT_TOKEN=<token>
./vsh -c "rm secret/dir/to/remove/"

Permission requirements

vsh requires List permission on the operated paths. This is necessary to determine if a path points to a node or leaf in the path tree. Further, it is needed to gather auto-completion data.

For operations like cp or mv, vsh additionally requires Read and Write permissions on the operated paths.

Quality

Working on vault secrets can be critical, making quality and correct behavior a first class citizen for vsh. That being said, vsh is still a small open source project, meaning we cannot make any guarantees. However, we put strong emphasis on TDD. Every PR is tested with an extensive suite of integration tests. Most tests run on KV1 and KV2 and every test runs against vault 1.0.0 and 1.5.4, i.e., versions in between should also be compatible.

Local Development

Requirements:

• golang (compiled and tested with v1.13.12)
• docker for integration testing
• make for simplified commands

make compile
make get-bats
make integration-tests

Debugging

-v DEBUG sets debug log level, which also creates a vsh_trace.log file to log any error object from the vault API.