Conjur::API

Programmatic Ruby access to the Conjur API.

RDocs are available from the through the Ruby Gem details page

Server Versions

The Conjur server comes in two major versions:

4.x Conjur 4 is a commercial, non-open-source product, which is documented at https://developer.conjur.net/.
5.x Conjur 5 is open-source software, hosted and documented at https://www.conjur.org/.

You can use the master branch of this project, which is conjur-api version 5.x, to do all of the following things against either type of Conjur server:

Authenticate
Fetch secrets
Check permissions
List roles, resources, members, memberships and permitted roles.
Create hosts using host factory
Rotate API keys

Use the configuration setting Conjur.configuration.version to select your server version, or set the environment variable CONJUR_VERSION. In either case, the valid values are 4 and 5; the default is 5.

If you are using Conjur server version 4.x, you can also choose to use the conjur-api version 4.x. In this case, the Configuration.version setting is not required (actually, it doesn't exist).

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'conjur-api'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install conjur-api

Usage

Connecting to Conjur is a two-step process:

Configuration Instruct the API where to find the Conjur endpoint and how to secure the connection.
Authentication Provide the API with credentials that it can use to authenticate.

Configuration

The simplest way to configure the Conjur API is to use the configuration file stored on the machine. If you have configured the machine with conjur init, its default location is ~/.conjurrc.

The Conjur configuration process also checks /etc/conjur.conf for global settings. This is typically used in server environments.

For custom scenarios, the location of the file can be overridden using the CONJURRC environment variable.

You can load the Conjur configuration file using the following Ruby code:

require 'conjur/cli'
Conjur::Config.load
Conjur::Config.apply

Note this code requires the conjur-cli gem, which should also be in your gemset or bundle.

Authentication

Once Conjur is configured, the connection can be established like this:

conjur = Conjur::Authn.connect nil, noask: true

To authenticate, the API client must provide a login name and api_key. The Conjur::Authn.connect will attempt the following, in order:

Look for login in environment variable CONJUR_AUTHN_LOGIN, and api_key in CONJUR_AUTHN_API_KEY
Look for credentials on disk. The default credentials file is ~/.netrc. The location of the credentials file can be overridden using the configuration file netrc_path option.
Prompt for credentials. This can be disabled using the option noask: true.

Connecting Without Files

It's possible to configure and authenticate the Conjur connection without using any files, and without requiring the conjur-cli gem.

To accomplish this, apply the configuration settings directly to the Conjur::Configuration object.

For example, specify the account and appliance_url (both of which are required) like this:

Conjur.configuration.account = 'my-account'
Conjur.configuration.appliance_url = 'https://conjur.mydomain.com/api'

You can also specify these values using environment variables, which is often a bit more convenient. Environment variables are mapped to configuration variables by prepending CONJUR_ to the all-caps name of the configuration variable. For example, appliance_url is CONJUR_APPLIANCE_URL, account is CONJUR_ACCOUNT.

In either case, you will also need to configure certificate trust. For example:

OpenSSL::SSL::SSLContext::DEFAULT_CERT_STORE.add_file "/etc/conjur-yourorg.pem"

Once Conjur is configured, you can create a new API client by providing a login and api_key:

Conjur::API.new_from_key login, api_key

Note that if you are connecting as a Host, the login should be prefixed with host/. For example: host/myhost.example.com, not just myhost.example.com.

Development (V5)

To develop and run tests against Conjur V5, use the start and stop scripts in the dev folder. The start script brings up an open source Conjur (and Postgres database), CLI container, and a "work" container, with the gem code mounted into the working directory.

Starting a Shell

To begin:

$ cd dev
$ ./start
...
root@9df0ac10ada2:/src/conjur-api#

You'll be dropped into development container upon completion. From there, install the development gems:

root@9df0ac10ada2:/src/conjur-api# bundle

Running Tests

NOTE: There are some existing challenges around running tests from the development console. For now, run tests by using the ./test.sh script utilized for Jenkins Pipelines.

Stopping & Environment Cleanup

Once you're done, exit the shell, and stop the containers:

root@9df0ac10ada2:/src/conjur-api# exit
$ ./stop

Development (V4)

The file docker-compose.yml is a self-contained development environment for the project.

Starting

To bring it up, run:

$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up -d pg conjur_4 conjur_5

Then configure the v4 and v5 servers:

$ ./ci/configure_v4.sh
...
$ ./ci/configure_v5.sh
...

Using

Obtain the API key for the v5 admin user:

$ docker-compose exec conjur_5 rake 'role:retrieve-key[cucumber:user:admin]'
3aezp05q3wkem3hmegymwzz8wh3bs3dr6xx3y3m2q41k5ymebkc

The password of the v4 admin user is "secret".

Now you can run the client dev container:

$ docker-compose run --rm dev

This gives you a shell session with conjur_4 and conjur_5 available as linked containers.

Demos

For a v5 demo, run:

$ bundle exec ./example/demo_v5.rb <admin-api-key>

For a v4 demo, run:

$ bundle exec ./example/demo_v4.rb

Stopping

To bring it down, run:

$ docker-compose down

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this software except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.