envwarden/envwarden repository overview

⁠🛑 NO LONGER MAINTAINED

I've decided to stop maintaining envwarden. The recent changes by Bitwarden⁠ made me realize that there are better solutions for managing server secrets. I'm now looking at using Doppler⁠, which offers a free plan as well. It's far better suited for server secrets than envwarden. I'm not affiliated with Doppler in any way.

Thanks to everyone who used envwarden and especially to those who contributed to it. It was a fun project to work on, but it's time to say goodbye. 👋

⁠${envwarden}

Manage your server secrets with Bitwarden⁠

⁠How?

Get your secure environment variables from Bitwarden onto your server.

envwarden searches your Bitwarden vault for items matching a search criteria (defaults to 'envwarden'). Then it goes through all custom fields on every item found and make them available as envirnoment variables.

⁠Installation

• Download envwarden⁠ (e.g. wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/envwarden/envwarden/master/envwarden)
• chmod +x envwarden && sudo cp envwarden /usr/local/bin to make it executable and reachable
• Download and install the bw CLI⁠ and jq⁠ version 1.6 and above!

⁠With Docker

• docker pull envwarden/envwarden

⁠Usage

⁠Adding secrets to Bitwarden

• Create an item you'd like to use for storing secrets. Try to make its name unique, so envwarden can easily find it and not any unrelated items. You might want to define the name based on your server or environment (e.g. staging, development, production)
• Add custom fields for each secure environment variable you need (fields can be text, hidden or boolean)
• You can add as many fields as you need, and you can also create multiple items, as long as they match the same search term (their secrets would be combined)
• You can also copy attachments on the searched items to a destination folder
• You should use separate logins for each environment, and ideally limit server access to only the secrets it needs, but it's up to you how to manage it

⁠Getting secrets onto your server

• You can store your Bitwarden login credentials inside ~/.envwarden if you wish
• Otherwise, you would be prompted for your email and password (or both)
• You can then use eval $(envwarden) to get your secrets exported to your environment
• Alternatively, you can output your secrets into an .env file using envwarden --dotenv

Usage: envwarden [--help] [--search] [--dotenv] [--copy]

To export environment variables, use: `eval $(envwarden)`
To create an .env file, use: `envwarden --dotenv > .env`

Options:
    -h --help
    -s --search <keyword> (optional) define the search term for bitwarden items (defaults to 'envwarden')
    -d --dotenv (optional) outputs to stdout in .env format
    -k --dotenv-docker (optional) outputs secrets to stdout in a "docker-friendly" .env format (no quotes)
    -c --copy <destination folder> (optional) copies all attachments on the item to a folder
    -g --github envs to github actions compliance
    -ss --skip-sync (optional) skip the vault sync (default will sync on every invocation)
    
You can use ~/.envwarden to store your credentials (email, email:password, or email:password:client_secret)
See https://bitwarden.com/help/article/cli-auth-challenges/#get-your-personal-api-key

⁠Running with Docker

You can provide your Bitwarden username and password using three methods:

# 1. Passing as environment to Docker
docker run -ti -e [email protected] -e BW_PASSWORD=careful envwarden/envwarden

# 2. Mapping your `.envwarden` file
docker run -ti -v $HOME/.envwarden:/root/.envwarden envwarden/envwarden

# 3. Waiting for `bw` to prompt for it for you
docker run -ti envwarden/envwarden

⁠Importing secrets to Kubernetes

with just 3 lines of bash⁠

⁠Notes

envwarden is a very simple bash script that wraps around the bw CLI. You can inspect it to make sure it's secure and doesn't leak your secrets in any way. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, and also secure.

eval is generally dangerous to run, but the script makes an effort to protect against command injection. --dotenv might be a slightly safer option if your application can work with .env files. Besides that, if you're worried about command injection from people who have write access to your secrets, you might have bigger problems to worry about, and perhaps envwarden isn't for you :)

envwarden would login and sync on every invocation. This isn't the fastest, but ideally you only need to run this when you bootstrap a new system, when you deploy, or when you need to refresh your secrets (in all cases, it probably makes sense to fetch the fresh secrets anyway).

envwarden is still experimental. Please use at your own risk. Feedback is welcome.

envwarden is not affiliated or connected to Bitwarden or its creators 8bit Solutions LLC in any way.