chamber

Chamber

Chamber is a tool for managing secrets. Currently it does so by storing secrets in SSM Parameter Store, an AWS service for storing secrets.

Authenticating

Using chamber requires you to be running in an environment with an authenticated AWS user which has the appropriate permission to read/write values to SSM Parameter Store. The easiest way to do so is by using aws-vault, like:

$ aws-vault exec prod -- chamber

For this reason, it is recommended that you create an alias in your shell of choice to save yourself some typing, for example (from my .zshrc):

alias chamberprod='aws-vault exec production -- chamber'

Usage

Writing Secrets

$ chamber write <service> <key> <value>

This operation will write a secret into the secret store. If a secret with that key already exists, it will increment the version and store a new value.

Listing Secrets

$ chamber list service
Key         Version                  LastModified      User
apikey      2                        06-09 17:30:56    daniel-fuentes
other       1                        06-09 17:30:34    daniel-fuentes

Listing secrets should show the key names for a given service, along with other useful metadata including when the secret was last modified, who modified it, and what the current version is.

Historic view

$ chamber history service key
Event       Version     Date            User
Created     1           06-09 17:30:19  daniel-fuentes
Updated     2           06-09 17:30:56  daniel-fuentes

The history command gives a historical view of a given secret. This view is useful for auditing changes, and can point you toward the user who made the change so it's easier to find out why changes were made.

Exec

$ chamber exec <service...> -- <your executable>

exec populates the environment with the secrets from the specified services and executes the given command. Secret keys are converted to upper case (for example a secret with key secret_key will become SECRET_KEY).

Secrets from services are loaded in the order specified in the command. For example, if you do chamber exec app apptwo -- ... and both apps have a secret named api_key, the api_key from apptwo will be the one set in your environment.

Releasing

To cut a new release, just push a tag named v<semver> where <semver> is a valid semver version. This tag will be used by Circle to automatically publish a github release.