README.rst

Conjur Python API Client

A Python client for the Conjur API.

Installation

The Conjur Python API requires Python 2.7. While we love Python 3, Python 2.x is the priority because of its widespread use by DevOps tools such as Salt and Ansible.

Install from PyPI

pip install conjur

Note: If you have the pandoc package installed you may need to uninstall it for the above command to work. You can do so with pip uninstall pypandoc.

API Documentation

See the API documentation for details of all classes and methods.

Usage

Configuration

# The `config` member of the conjur.config module is a "global" Configuration
# used by new API instances by default.
from conjur.config import config

# Set the conjur appliance url.  This can also be provided
# by the CONJUR_APPLIANCE_URL environment variable.
config.appliance_url = 'https://conjur.example.com/api'

# Set the (PEM) certificate file. This is also configurable with the
# CONJUR_CERT_FILE environment variable.
config.cert_file = '/path/to/conjur-account.pem'

Creating and Using an API Instance

import conjur

# For God's sake, don't put passwords in your source code!
password = 'super-secret'
login = 'alice'

# Create an API instance that can perform actions as the user 'alice'
api = conjur.new_from_key(login, password)

# Use the API to fetch the value of a variable

secret = api.variable('my-secret').value()

print("The secret is '{}'".format(secret))

new_from_key accepts a Conjur username and an api_key or password (see the Conjur developer documentation for details about the distinction). This is useful if your script is authenticating as an particular Conjur identity rather than acting on behalf of a user who has provided their token.

When created using this method, the API will attempt to authenticate the first time a method requiring authorization is called. To force it to authenticate immediately, you can use the authenticate() method. An instance created with new_from_key will cache it's auth token indefinitely. Since Conjur auth tokens expire after 8 minutes, you can force an api instance to update its token by calling api.authenticate(cached=False) or by setting api.token = None.

Other Ways to Create an API Instance

If the host running your application has been assigned a Conjur identity new_from_netrc is the easiest way to create an API instance.

import conjur
from conjur.config import config

config.load('/etc/conjur.conf')
api = conjur.new_from_netrc('/etc/conjur.identity', config=config)

If you have an existing authentication token, for example when handling an HTTP request that contains an end user's token, use new_from_token to create your API instance.

import conjur
# ... some web magic

api = conjur.new_from_token(request.get_json()['user_token'])
salesforce_apikey = api.variable('sales/salesforce/api_key')

YAML file

Conjurized hosts will have this file placed at /etc/conjur.conf.

Running locally this will be your ~/.conjurrc file.

from conjur.config import config

config.load('/etc/conjur.conf')

Variables

You can create, fetch and update variables like so:

import os
import conjur

api = conjur.new_from_key(login='danny', api_key=os.getenv('CONJUR_API_KEY'))

loggly_token = api.create_variable(
    id='monitoring/loggly.com/api-token',
    value='dEet7Hib1oSh9g'
)

gis_database_password = api.variable('gis/postgres/password')
print(gis_database_password.value())

gis_database_password.add_value('lij6det8eJ7pIx')

If no id is given, a unique id will be generated. If a value is provided, it will be used to set the variable's initial value. When fetching a variable, you can pass a version keyword argument to value() to retrieve a specific version.

Users

Create a user alice with password super-secret.

alice = api.create_user('alice', password='super-secret')

Create a user bob without a password, and save the API key. When creating a Conjur user, the API is available in the response. However, retrieving the user in the future will not return the API key.

bob = api.create_user('bob')
bob_api_key = bob.api_key

print("Created user 'bob' with api key '{}'".format(bob_api_key))

Fetch a user named 'otto', and check whether or not it was found:

if api.user('otto').exists():
  print("Otto exists!")
else:
  print("Sorry, otto doesn't exist :-(")

Groups

Create a group named developers and add an existing user alice to it.

devs = api.create_group('developers')

Development

Clone this project and run:

pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements_dev.txt

Run tests and linting with:

./jenkins.sh

PyPi

To publish to PyPi, you will need to convert this document to restructured text using pandoc:

pandoc --from=markdown --to=rst --output=README.rst README.md

Furthermore, you will likely need to have the pypandoc package installed for the markup to appear correctly on the PyPi site.