crypta

Crypta

Local developer credentials as simple as it should be.

• Documentation: https://codetent.github.io/crypta/
• Releases: https://github.com/codetent/crypta/releases
• Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md

What is crypta?

Crypta is a CLI tool that caches your local development credentials allowing you to enter them once and using it multiple times without beeing asked.

It can be also integrated in CI environments where a secret provider is available. In this case, the values can be provided using environment variables without adapting your scripts.

Why do I need it?

If your build environment is pulling files from access protected services, you usually need credentials to authenticate. The best practice for this use case is to use your credentials instead of hardcoding them in your scripts.

Especially if you run the environment locally or even in the cloud without using any secret provider, you have to provide the credentials somehow to your build environment.

This is where crypta steps in: it is simply called in your build scripts when you need credentials to authenticate. If credentials are already cached, it will provide them. Otherwise, it will ask for them and cache them afterwards.

How do I use it?

Crypta consists of a secret store & a client application. The secret store needs to be started first before the client application can be used. This is done by calling

crypta daemon

The secret store (or as we call it: the daemon) is a blocking process, which is probably why you will either want to spawn it in its own shell, or move the process to the background.

  sh -c "crypta daemon"

  start cmd.exe /c "crypta.exe daemon"

  crypta daemon &

  start /B crypta daemon

When the daemon is running, you can use crypta's get & set commands to interact with the secret store. For more information, check out the CLI reference.

Installation

You will find the latest release of crypta in GitHub Releases section.

Otherwise you can install it from source using go install:

go install github.com/codetent/crypta@latest

Usage in CI environments

CI environments usually provide some sort of secret provider. It is common that secrets are made available to the execution environment via environment variables. Crypta supports this usecase as well by pre-populating the secret store with secret content from environment variables with the prefix CRYPTA_SECRET_<KEY>. The environment variables are parsed when the crypta daemon is started.

In your build scripts, whenever you need to retrieve a secret, you would call crypta get <KEY>. If the build script is executed in a CI environment, where a secret provider is available, the secret is pre-populated via the CRYPTA_SECRET_<KEY> environment variable. If the build script is executed in a local development environment on the other hand, a secret provider is usually not available. Therefore, no pre-population of the secret store takes place and Crypta would now request the user to input the value for the secret (e.g., their user credentials). This allows you to use the same build script in your CI and local development environment, without any adaptations or special case handling required to handle the secrets.