vault-backup

Dump your Hashicorp Vault to a file. Not guaranteed to be consistent. Dump is a form of commands to inject keys into Vault, so it is convenient to use it later on to restore to different Vault, for example.

vault kv put /secret/users \
  test1_user='test_pass'
vault write /secret/dev/bash-org-244321 \
  AzureDiamond='hunter2'

Environment variables

The following environment variables are used:

PYTHONIOENCODING is used to ensure your keys are exported in valid encoding, make sure to use the same during import/export
VAULT_ADDR - vault address endpoint to use, default is http://localhost:8200
VAULT_MOUNT - Vault mount point to dump, optional, defaults to "secret"
TOP_VAULT_PREFIX - path to dump, optional, useful when dumping only a fraction of the vault, defaults to ""
VAULT_CACERT - cert if using https:// with client cert, but actually not tested
VAULT_SKIP_VERIFY - Skip TLS cert verification, default to false

Known limitations

Only KV Secrets Engine version 2 is supported.
Delete items are ignored with a warning.
You still need a Vault client in order to authenticate.
You must have the right to list keys for TOP_VAULT_PREFIX, otherwise you will get an error with trace.

Preparing Python environment

Under Ubuntu you need the following packages:

python-pip
python-virtualenv

virtualenv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Example usage

Activate virtualenv.
Export some vars:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
export VAULT_ADDR=https://vault.tld:12345
export VAULT_MOUNT=it_secrets
export TOP_VAULT_PREFIX=/dev

Authenticate to Vault, for example:

vault auth -method=ldap username=your-username

After successful authorization you can run dump script and encrypt it with GPG to the output file:

python vault-dump.py | gpg -e -r GPG_KEY_ID > vault.dump.txt.gpg

Importing to new vault

Warning: All corresponding keys will be overwritten.

Authenticate to Vault, for example:

vault auth -method=ldap username=user-in-new-vault

Disable bash history, decrypt encrypted file and execute commands stored inside: