Getting started

Bank-Vaults is a swiss-army knife with multiple manifestations, so the first steps depend on what you want to achieve.

Deploy with Helm

We have some fully fledged, production-ready Helm charts for deploying:

With the help of these charts you can run a HA Vault instance with automatic initialization, unsealing, and external configuration which would otherwise be a tedious manual operation. Also secrets from Vault can be injected into your Pods directly as environment variables (without using Kubernetes Secrets). These charts can be used easily for development purposes as well.

Note: Starting with Bank-Vaults version 1.6.0, only Helm 3 is supported.

Deploy a local Vault operator

This is the simplest scenario: you install the Vault operator on a simple cluster. The following commands install a single-node Vault instance that stores unseal and root tokens in Kubernetes secrets. If you want to customize the Helm chart, see the list of vault-operator Helm chart values.

  1. Install the Bank-Vaults operator:

    helm upgrade --install --wait vault-operator oci://ghcr.io/bank-vaults/helm-charts/vault-operator

    Expected output:

    Release "vault-operator" does not exist. Installing it now.
Pulled: ghcr.io/bank-vaults/helm-charts/vault-operator:1.20.0
Digest: sha256:46045be1c3b215f0c734908bb1d4022dc91eae48d2285382bb71d63f72c737d1
NAME: vault-operator
LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Jul 27 11:22:55 2023
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None

  2. Create a Vault instance using the Vault custom resources. This will create a Kubernetes CustomResource called vault and a PersistentVolumeClaim for it:

    kubectl kustomize https://github.com/bank-vaults/vault-operator/deploy/rbac | kubectl apply -f -

    Expected output:

    serviceaccount/vault created
    role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/vault created
    role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/leader-election-role created
    rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/leader-election-rolebinding created
    rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/vault created
    clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/vault-auth-delegator created
    
    kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bank-vaults/vault-operator/v1.21.0/deploy/examples/cr-raft.yaml

    Expected output:

    vault.vault.banzaicloud.com/vault created

    Note: If needed, you can install the latest CustomResource from the main branch, but that’s usually under development and might not be stable.

    kubectl kustomize https://github.com/bank-vaults/vault-operator/deploy/crd | kubectl apply -f -

  3. Wait a few seconds, then check the operator and the vault pods:

    kubectl get pods

    Expected output:

    NAME                                                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
vault-0                                                     3/3       Running   0          10s
vault-configurer-6c545cb6b4-dmvb5                           1/1       Running   0          10s
vault-operator-788559bdc5-kgqkg                             1/1       Running   0          23s

  4. Configure your Vault client to access the Vault instance running in the vault-0 pod.

    1. Port-forward into the pod:

      kubectl port-forward vault-0 8200 &

    2. Set the address of the Vault instance.

      export VAULT_ADDR=https://127.0.0.1:8200

    3. Import the CA certificate of the Vault instance by running the following commands (otherwise, you’ll get x509: certificate signed by unknown authority errors):

      kubectl get secret vault-tls -o jsonpath="{.data.ca\.crt}" | base64 --decode > $PWD/vault-ca.crt
export VAULT_CACERT=$PWD/vault-ca.crt

      Alternatively, you can instruct the Vault client to skip verifying the certificate of Vault by running: export VAULT_SKIP_VERIFY=true

    4. If you already have the Vault CLI installed, check that you can access the Vault:

      vault status

      Expected output:

      Key             Value
---             -----
Seal Type       shamir
Initialized     true
Sealed          false
Total Shares    5
Threshold       3
Version         1.5.4
Cluster Name    vault-cluster-27ecd0e6
Cluster ID      ed5492f3-7ef3-c600-aef3-bd77897fd1e7
HA Enabled      false

    5. To authenticate to Vault, you can access its root token by running:

      export VAULT_TOKEN=$(kubectl get secrets vault-unseal-keys -o jsonpath={.data.vault-root} | base64 --decode)

      Note: Using the root token is recommended only in test environments. In production environment, create dedicated, time-limited tokens.

    6. Now you can interact with Vault. For example, add a secret by running vault kv put secret/demosecret/aws AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=s3cr3t If you want to access the Vault web interface, open https://127.0.0.1:8200 in your browser using the root token (to reveal the token, run echo $VAULT_TOKEN).

For other configuration examples of the Vault CustomResource, see the YAML files in the deploy/examples and test/deploy directories of the vault-operator repository. After you are done experimenting with Bank-Vaults and you want to delete the operator, you can delete the related CRs:

kubectl kustomize https://github.com/bank-vaults/vault-operator/deploy/rbac | kubectl delete -f -
kubectl delete -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bank-vaults/vault-operator/v1.21.0/deploy/examples/cr-raft.yaml

Deploy the mutating webhook

You can deploy the Vault Secrets Webhook using Helm. Note that:

  • The Helm chart of the vault-secrets-webhook contains the templates of the required permissions as well.
  • The deployed RBAC objects contain the necessary permissions fo running the webhook.

Prerequisites

  • The user you use for deploying the chart to the Kubernetes cluster must have cluster-admin privileges.
  • The chart requires Helm 3.
  • To interact with Vault (for example, for testing), the Vault command line client must be installed on your computer.
  • You have deployed Vault with the operator and configured your Vault client to access it, as described in Deploy a local Vault operator.

Deploy the webhook

  1. Create a namespace for the webhook and add a label to the namespace, for example, vault-infra:

    kubectl create namespace vault-infra
kubectl label namespace vault-infra name=vault-infra

  2. Deploy the vault-secrets-webhook chart. If you want to customize the Helm chart, see the list of vault-secrets-webhook Helm chart values.

    helm upgrade --install --wait vault-secrets-webhook oci://ghcr.io/bank-vaults/helm-charts/vault-secrets-webhook --namespace vault-infra

    Expected output:

    Release "vault-secrets-webhook" does not exist. Installing it now.
NAME: vault-secrets-webhook
LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Jul 14 15:42:36 2023
NAMESPACE: vault-infra
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None

    For further details, see the webhook’s Helm chart repository.

  3. Check that the pods are running:

    kubectl get pods --namespace vault-infra

    Expected output:

    NAME                                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
vault-secrets-webhook-58b97c8d6d-qfx8c   1/1     Running   0          22s
vault-secrets-webhook-58b97c8d6d-rthgd   1/1     Running   0          22s

  4. If you already have the Vault CLI installed, write a secret into Vault:

    vault kv put secret/demosecret/aws AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=s3cr3t

    Expected output:

    Key              Value
---              -----
created_time     2020-11-04T11:39:01.863988395Z
deletion_time    n/a
destroyed        false
version          1

  5. Apply the following deployment to your cluster. The webhook will mutate this deployment because it has an environment variable having a value which is a reference to a path in Vault:

    kubectl apply -f - <<"EOF"
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: vault-test
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app.kubernetes.io/name: vault
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app.kubernetes.io/name: vault
      annotations:
        vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-addr: "https://vault:8200" # optional, the address of the Vault service, default values is https://vault:8200
        vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-role: "default" # optional, the default value is the name of the ServiceAccount the Pod runs in, in case of Secrets and ConfigMaps it is "default"
        vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-skip-verify: "false" # optional, skip TLS verification of the Vault server certificate
        vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-tls-secret: "vault-tls" # optional, the name of the Secret where the Vault CA cert is, if not defined it is not mounted
        vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-agent: "false" # optional, if true, a Vault Agent will be started to do Vault authentication, by default not needed and vault-env will do Kubernetes Service Account based Vault authentication
        vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-path: "kubernetes" # optional, the Kubernetes Auth mount path in Vault the default value is "kubernetes"
    spec:
      serviceAccountName: default
      containers:
      - name: alpine
        image: alpine
        command: ["sh", "-c", "echo $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY && echo going to sleep... && sleep 10000"]
        env:
        - name: AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
          value: vault:secret/data/demosecret/aws#AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
EOF

    Expected output:

    deployment.apps/vault-test created

  6. Check the mutated deployment.

    kubectl describe deployment vault-test

    The output should look similar to the following:

    Name:                   vault-test
Namespace:              default
CreationTimestamp:      Wed, 04 Nov 2020 12:44:18 +0100
Labels:                 <none>
Annotations:            deployment.kubernetes.io/revision: 1
Selector:               app.kubernetes.io/name=vault
Replicas:               1 desired | 1 updated | 1 total | 1 available | 0 unavailable
StrategyType:           RollingUpdate
MinReadySeconds:        0
RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
Pod Template:
  Labels:           app.kubernetes.io/name=vault
  Annotations:      vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-addr: https://vault:8200
                    vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-agent: false
                    vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-path: kubernetes
                    vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-role: default
                    vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-skip-verify: false
                    vault.security.banzaicloud.io/vault-tls-secret: vault-tls
  Service Account:  default
  Containers:
   alpine:
    Image:      alpine
    Port:       <none>
    Host Port:  <none>
    Command:
      sh
      -c
      echo $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY && echo going to sleep... && sleep 10000
    Environment:
      AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY:  vault:secret/data/demosecret/aws#AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
    Mounts:                   <none>
  Volumes:                    <none>
Conditions:
  Type           Status  Reason
  ----           ------  ------
  Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
OldReplicaSets:  <none>
NewReplicaSet:   vault-test-55c569f9 (1/1 replicas created)
Events:
  Type    Reason             Age   From                   Message
  ----    ------             ----  ----                   -------
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  29s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set vault-test-55c569f9 to 1

    As you can see, the original environment variables in the definition are unchanged, and the sensitive value of the AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY variable is only visible within the alpine container.

Install the CLI tool

You can download the bank-vaults CLI from the Bank-Vaults releases page. Select the binary for your platform from the Assets section for the version you want to use.

Alternatively, fetch the source code and compile it using go get:

go get github.com/bank-vaults/bank-vaults/cmd/bank-vaults
go get github.com/bank-vaults/bank-vaults/cmd/vault-env

Docker images

If you want to build upon our Docker images, you can find them on Docker Hub:

docker pull ghcr.io/bank-vaults/vault-operator:latest
docker pull ghcr.io/bank-vaults/vault-env:latest
Last modified March 23, 2025: chore(deps): Bump actions/setup-node from 4.2.0 to 4.3.0 (#248) (270ae20)