Vault

Vault is a secrets management system from Hashicorp. Canvas will eventually use Vault for its key-value store and for authentication tokens for some backend services, though there will be a file-based alternative in the style of dynamic_settings.yml

For those who need to run Vault in development we've provided a docker-compose override file to start up a vault server and a rake task to initialize the vault container. Note that you will need to re-init vault every time you restart the container, as development vault cannot persist data to disk

Enabling Vault

To enable use of Vault with Docker there are three things that you need to do.

1. Add docker-compose/vault.override.yml to your COMPOSE_FILE env var.
2. Un-comment the development vault configuration in config/vault.yml
3. Run the rake task to pre-populate the config values in vault: docker compose run --rm web bin/rake canvas:seed_vault