Historically, deploying Python projects has been a pain in the neck for the security-conscious. First, PyPI lets authors change the contents of their packages without revving their version numbers. Second, any future compromise of PyPI or its caching CDN means you could get a package that's different from the one you signed up for. If you wanted to guarantee known-good dependencies for your deployment, you had to either run a local PyPI mirror--manually uploading packages as you vetted them--or else check everything into a vendor library, necessitating a lot of fooling around with your VCS (or maintaining custom tooling) to do upgrades.
Peep fixes much of that.
Vet your packages, put hashes of the PyPI-sourced tarballs into
requirements.txt
, use peep install
instead of pip install
, and let
the crypto do the rest. If a downloaded package doesn't match the hash,
peep
will freak out, and installation will go no further. No servers to
maintain, no enormous vendor libs to wrestle. Just requirements.txt
with
some funny-looking comments and peace of mind.
Peep guarantees repeatability.
If you
peep install
package x version y, every subsequent install of package x version y will be the same as the original, or Peep will complain.Peep does not vet your packages.
Peep is not a substitute for vetting your packages. If you don't vet them, then they are not vetted.
Peep does not alleviate trust problems with authors or package indexes.
All peep does is guarantee that subsequent downloads of package x version y are the same as the first one you did. It doesn't guarantee the author of that package is trustworthy. It doesn't guarantee that the author of that package released that package. It doesn't guarantee that the package index is trustworthy.
Install
peep
:pip install peep
Use
peep
to install your project once:cd yourproject peep install -r requirements.txt
You'll get output like this:
<a bunch of pip output> The following packages had no hashes specified in the requirements file, which leaves them open to tampering. Vet these packages to your satisfaction, then add these "sha256" lines like so: # sha256: L9XU_-gfdi3So-WEctaQoNu6N2Z3ZQYAOu4-16qor-8 Flask==0.9 # sha256: YhddA1kUpMLVODNbhIgHfQn88vioPHLwayTyqwOJEgY futures==2.1.3 # sha256: qF4YU3XbdcEJ-Z7N49VUFfA15waKgiUs9PFsZnrDj0k Jinja2==2.6 # sha256: u_8C3DCeUoRt2WPSlIOnKV_MAhYkc40zNZxDlxCA-as Pygments==1.4 ------------------------------- Not proceeding to installation.
Vet the packages coming off PyPI in whatever way you typically do.
Add the recommended hash lines to your
requirements.txt
, each one directly above the requirement it applies to. (The hashes are of the original, compressed tarballs from PyPI.)In the future, always use
peep install
to install your requirements. You are now cryptographically safe!
If, during installation, a hash doesn't match, peep
will say something like
this:
THE FOLLOWING PACKAGES DIDN'T MATCHES THE HASHES SPECIFIED IN THE REQUIREMENTS FILE. If you have updated the package versions, update the hashes. If not, freak out, because someone has tampered with the packages. requests: expected FWvz7Ce6nsfgz4--AoCHGAmdIY3kA-tkpxTXO6GimrE got YhddA1kUpMLVODNbhIgHfQn88vioPHLwayTyqwOJEgY
It will then exit with a status of 1. Freak out appropriately.
peep
implicitly turns on pip's--no-deps
option so unverified dependencies of your requirements can't sneak through.All non-install commands just fall through to pip, so you can use
peep
all the time if you want. This comes in handy for existing scripts that have a big$PIP=/path/to/pip
at the top.peep
-compatible requirements files remain entirely usable withpip
, because the hashes are just comments, after all.Have a manually downloaded package you've vetted? Run
peep hash
on its tarball (the original, from PyPI--be sure to keep it around) to get its hash line:% peep hash nose-1.3.0.tar.gz # sha256: TmPMMyXedc-Y_61AvnL6aXU96CRpUXMXj3TANP5PUmA
If a package is already present--which might be the case if you're installing into a non-empty virtualenv--
peep
doesn't bother downloading or building it again. It assumes you installed it withpeep
in a previous invocation and thus trusts it. Re-using a virtualenv during deployment can really speed things up, but it does leave open the question of how to remove dependencies which are no longer needed.
Peep was designed for unsupervised continuous deployment scenarios. In such
scenarios, manual ahead-of-time prepartion on the deployment machine is a
liability: one more thing to go wrong. To relieve you of having to install (and
upgrade) peep
by hand on your server or build box, we've made peep
embeddable. You can copy the peep.py
file directly into your project's
source tree and call it from there in your deployment script. This also gives
you an obvious starting point for your chain of trust: however you trust your
source code is how you trust your copy of peep
, and peep
verifies
everything else via hashes. (Equivalent would be if your OS provided peep as a
package--presumably you trust your OS packages already--but this is not yet
common.)
Are you suddenly getting the Fearsome Warning? Maybe you're really in trouble, but maybe something more innocuous is happening.
A few packages offer downloads in multiple formats: for example, zips and tarballs. PyPI used to be unpredictable as to which it offered first, and pip simply takes the first one offered. Thus, if you're running an old version of PyPI internally or have some other Cheeseshop implementation which lacks a stable sort order, some packages may effectively have more than one valid hash for a given version. To allow for these, you can stack up multiple known-good hashes above a requirement, as long as they are within a contiguous block of commented lines:
# Tarball: # sha256: lvpN706AIAvoJ8P1EUfdez-ohzuSB-MyXUe6Rb8ppcE # # And the zip file: # sha256: 6QTt-5DahBKcBiUs06BfkLTuvBu1uF7pblb_bPaUONU mock==0.8.0
If you don't want to wait until you're bitten by this surprise, use the peep
hash
command to find hashes of each equivalent archive for a package. I like
to vet one of them (say, the tarball), then download the other and use a file
comparison tool to verify that they have identical contents. Then I run peep
hash
over both original archives, like so, and add the result to my
requirements.txt
:
% peep hash mock-0.8.0.tar.gz mock-0.8.0.zip # sha256: lvpN706AIAvoJ8P1EUfdez-ohzuSB-MyXUe6Rb8ppcE # sha256: 6QTt-5DahBKcBiUs06BfkLTuvBu1uF7pblb_bPaUONU
- 0.9.1
- Don't crash when trying to report a missing hash on a package that's already installed.
- 0.9
- Put the operative parts of peep into a single module rather than a package, and make it directly executable. (Brian Warner)
- 0.8
- Support installing into non-empty virtualenvs, for speed. We do this by
trusting any already-installed package which satisfies a requirement. This
means you no longer have to rebuild
lxml
, for instance, each time you deploy. - Wrap text output to 80 columns for nicer word wrap.
- Support installing into non-empty virtualenvs, for speed. We do this by
trusting any already-installed package which satisfies a requirement. This
means you no longer have to rebuild
- 0.7
Make some practical tweaks for projects which bootstrap their trust chains by checking a tarball of peep into their source trees.
- Start supporting versions of pip back to 0.6.2 (released in January 2010).
This way, you can deploy trustworthily on old versions of RHEL just by
checking a tarball of peep into your source tree and pip-installing it; you
don't have to check in pip itself or go to the bother of unpacking the peep
tarball and running
python setup.py install
from your deploy script. - Remove the explicit dependency on pip. This is so a blithe call to
pip install peep.tar.gz
without--no-deps
doesn't go out and pull an untrusted package from PyPI. Instead, we scream at runtime if pip is absent or too old. Fail safe.
- Start supporting versions of pip back to 0.6.2 (released in January 2010).
This way, you can deploy trustworthily on old versions of RHEL just by
checking a tarball of peep into your source tree and pip-installing it; you
don't have to check in pip itself or go to the bother of unpacking the peep
tarball and running
- 0.6
- Add
peep hash
subcommand. - Require pip>=1.2, as lower versions have a bug that causes a crash on
peep install
.
- Add
- 0.5
- Allow multiple acceptable hashes for a package. This works around PyPI's non-stable handling of packages like mock, which provide equivalent zips and tarballs: https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pypi/issue/64/order-of-archives-on-index-page-is-not.
- 0.4
- Rework how peep downloads files and determines versions so we can tolerate PEP-386-noncompliant package version numbers. This amounted to a minor rewrite.
- Remove indentation from hash output so you don't have to dedent it after
pasting it into
requirements.txt
.
- 0.3
- Support Windows and other non-Unix OSes.
- The hash output now includes the actual version numbers of packages, so you
can just paste it straight into your
requirements.txt
.
- 0.2.1
- Add a shebang line so you can actually run
peep
after doingpip install peep
. Sorry, folks, I was doingsetup.py develop
on my own box.
- Add a shebang line so you can actually run
- 0.2
- Fix repeated-logging bug.
- Fix spurious error message about not having any requirements files.
- Pass pip's exit code through to the outside for calls to non-
install
subcommands. - Improve spacing in the final output.
- 0.1
- Proof of concept. Does all the crypto stuff. Should be secure. Some rough edges in the UI.