# credentials: Fetch secrets from the environment or from Vault
[](https://crates.io/crates/credentials) [](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) [](https://travis-ci.org/emk/credentials) [](https://docs.rs/credentials/)
A [twelve-factor app][12factor] (as popularized by Heroku) would normally
store any passwords or other secrets in environment variables. The
alternative would be to include the passwords directly in the source code,
which would make it much easier to accidentally reveal them to the world.
But once your application deployment becomes more complex, it's much easier
to store passwords in a central, secure store such as Hashicorp's
[Vault][vault] or Square's [Keywhiz][keywhiz].
Wherever you choose to store your secrets, this library is intended to
provide a single, unified API:
```rust
credentials::var("EXAMPLE_USERNAME").unwrap();
credentials::var("EXAMPLE_PASSWORD").unwrap();
```
By default, this will return the values of the `EXAMPLE_USERNAME`
and `EXAMPLE_PASSWORD` environment variables.
## Accessing Vault
To fetch the secrets from Vault, you will first need to set up the same
things you would need to use the `vault` command line tool or the `vault`
Ruby gem:
- You need to set the `VAULT_ADDR` environment variable to the URL of your
Vault server.
- You can store your Vault token in either the environment variable
`VAULT_TOKEN` or the file `~/.vault-token`.
Let's assume you have the following secret stored in your vault:
```sh
vault write secret/example username=myuser password=mypass
```
To access it, you'll need to create a `Secretfile` in the directory from
which you run your application:
```
# Comments are allowed.
EXAMPLE_USERNAME secret/example:username
EXAMPLE_PASSWORD secret/example:password
```
If you have per-environment secrets, you can interpolate environment
variables into the path portion of the `Secretfile` using `$VAR` or
`${VAR}`:
```
PG_USERNAME postgresql/$VAULT_ENV/creds/readonly:username
PG_PASSWORD postgresql/$VAULT_ENV/creds/readonly:password
```
As before, you can access these secrets using:
```rust
credentials::var("EXAMPLE_USERNAME").unwrap();
credentials::var("EXAMPLE_PASSWORD").unwrap();
credentials::var("PG_USERNAME").unwrap();
credentials::var("PG_PASSWORD").unwrap();
```
## Kubernetes integration
We also support [Vault's Kubernetes Auth Method][kubernetes-auth]. To use this, you need to set the following environment variables:
- `VAULT_ADDR`: The URL of the Vault server.
- `VAULT_KUBERNETES_AUTH_PATH`: The Vault path at which the Kubernetes auth method was mounted (defaults to `"kubernetes"`). This allows you to support more than one Kubernetes cluster using a single Vault server.
- `VAULT_KUBERNETES_ROLE`: The name of the Vault Kubernetes role, as configured under `/auth/kubernetes/role` in Vault.
For an example of how to set up Vault Kubernetes auth using OpenShift, see [this article][openshift-example].
## Example code
See [the `examples` directory](/examples) for complete, working code.
## TODO
The following features remain to be implemented:
- Honor Vault TTLs.
- Keywhiz support. The big obstacle here is that I can't get Keywhiz
keystore stuff working correctly using `curl`.
## Contributions
Your feedback and contributions are welcome! Just file an issue or send a
GitHub pull request.
[12factor]: http://12factor.net/
[vault]: https://www.vaultproject.io/
[keywhiz]: https://square.github.io/keywhiz/
[kubernetes-auth]: https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/kubernetes.html
[openshift-example]: https://blog.openshift.com/vault-integration-using-kubernetes-authentication-method/