external-secrets/docs/provider/chef.md

Chef

Chef External Secrets provider will enable users to seamlessly integrate their Chef-based secret management with Kubernetes through the existing External Secrets framework.

In many enterprises, legacy applications and infrastructure are still tightly integrated with the Chef/Chef Infra Server/Chef Server Cluster for configuration and secrets management. Teams often rely on Chef data bags to securely store sensitive information such as application secrets and infrastructure configurations. These data bags serve as a centralized repository for managing and distributing sensitive data across the Chef ecosystem.

NOTE: Chef External Secrets provider is designed only to fetch data from the Chef data bags into Kubernetes secrets, it won't update/delete any item in the data bags.

Authentication

Every request made to the Chef Infra server needs to be authenticated. Authentication is done using the Private keys of the Chef Users. The User needs to have appropriate Permissions to the data bags containing the data that they want to fetch using the External Secrets Operator.

The following command can be used to create Chef Users:

chef-server-ctl user-create USER_NAME FIRST_NAME [MIDDLE_NAME] LAST_NAME EMAIL 'PASSWORD' (options)

More details on the above command are available here Chef User Create Option. The above command will return the default private key (PRIVATE_KEY_VALUE), which we will use for authentication. Additionally, a Chef User with access to specific data bags, a private key pair with an expiration date can be created with the help of the knife user key command.

Create a secret containing your private key

We need to store the above User's API key into a secret resource. Example:

kubectl create secret generic chef-user-secret -n vivid --from-literal=user-private-key='PRIVATE_KEY_VALUE'

Creating ClusterSecretStore

The Chef ClusterSecretStore is a cluster-scoped SecretStore that can be referenced by all Chef ExternalSecrets from all namespaces. You can follow the below example to create a ClusterSecretStore resource.

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterSecretStore
metadata:
  name: vivid-clustersecretstore # name of ClusterSecretStore
spec:
  provider:
    chef:
      username: user # Chef User name
      serverUrl: https://manage.chef.io/organizations/testuser/ # Chef server URL
      auth:
        secretRef:
          privateKeySecretRef:
            key: user-private-key # name of the key inside Secret resource
            name: chef-user-secret # name of Kubernetes Secret resource containing the Chef User's private key
            namespace: vivid # the namespace in which the above Secret resource resides

Creating SecretStore

Chef SecretStores are bound to a namespace and can not reference resources across namespaces. For cross-namespace SecretStores, you must use Chef ClusterSecretStores.

You can follow the below example to create a SecretStore resource.

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: vivid-secretstore # name of SecretStore
  namespace: vivid # must be required for kind: SecretStore
spec:
  provider:
    chef:
      username: user # Chef User name
      serverUrl: https://manage.chef.io/organizations/testuser/ # Chef server URL
      auth:
        secretRef:
          privateKeySecretRef:
            name: chef-user-secret # name of Kubernetes Secret resource containing the Chef User's private key
            key: user-private-key # name of the key inside Secret resource
            namespace: vivid # the ns where the k8s secret resource containing Chef User's private key resides

Creating ExternalSecret

The Chef ExternalSecret describes what data should be fetched from Chef Data bags, and how the data should be transformed and saved as a Kind=Secret.

You can follow the below example to create an ExternalSecret resource.

{% include 'chef-external-secret.yaml' %}

When the above ClusterSecretStore and ExternalSecret resources are created, the ExternalSecret will connect to the Chef Server using the private key and will fetch the data bags contained in the vivid-credentials secret resource.

To get all data items inside the data bag, you can use the dataFrom directive:

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: vivid-external-secrets # name of ExternalSecret
  namespace: vivid # namespace inside which the ExternalSecret will be created
  annotations:
    company/contacts: user.a@company.com, user.b@company.com
    company/team: vivid-dev
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: external-secrets
spec:
  refreshInterval: 1h
  secretStoreRef:
    name: vivid-clustersecretstore # name of ClusterSecretStore
    kind: ClusterSecretStore
  dataFrom:
  - extract:
      key: vivid_global # only data bag name
  target:
    name: vivid_global_all_cred # name of Kubernetes Secret resource that will be created and will contain the obtained secrets
    creationPolicy: Owner

follow : this file for more info