consul-backinator

Summary

Flexible Consul KV pair backup and restore tool with a few unique features including ACL token and prepared query backup and restoration.

Key Features

• Written in Golang using the official Consul API
• No limits on the number of keys that can be backed up or restored
• Backup files are written as gzip compressed and AES256 encrypted JSON data
• Data integrity validation via HMAC-SHA256 signature of the raw data
• Optional path transformation (path replacement) on key backup and/or restore
• Clean well documented code that's simple to follow
• Direct AWS/S3 support for backup and restoration of KVs, ACLs and queries
• Node auto discovery in cloud environments via go-discover

Installing

OS X/macOS Homebrew users ...

brew install consul-backinator

Users with a proper Go environment (1.8+ required) ...

go get -u github.com/myENA/consul-backinator

Developers that wish to take advantage of vendoring and other options ...

git clone https://github.com/myENA/consul-backinator.git
cd consul-backinator
make

To build as a Docker container ...

git clone https://github.com/myENA/consul-backinator.git
cd consul-backinator
make docker

To use the latest container from Docker Hub ...

docker pull myena/consul-backinator
docker run myena/consul-backinator

See DOCKER.md for some Docker use cases.

To run on Nomad ...

git clone https://github.com/myENA/consul-backinator.git
cd consul-backinator

Edit the job specification file consul-backinator.nomad to suit your environment. It uses S3 by default and must be configured with the correct bucket URI, access key, and secret key. It's recommended to use a dedicated consul-backinator user with IAM permissions to just this bucket for security purposes. The job runs every 15 minutes by default and logs to STDERR and STDOUT.

Security

Releases after 1.4 will be accompanied by a GPG signed SHA256SUM file.

Releases from 1.6.6 will use this GPG key:

Education Networks of America (ENA github code signing key) <rd@ena.com>

The public key 720E001BD902187F83763C62C924F0AC9DA36FEB is available via public servers and gpg/rd@ena.com.asc in this repository.

For previous releases, they are signed by this key:

ENA R&D Team (ENA R&D code signing key) <r&d@ena.com> 73F17750

This old key is still available at 62859FAD5BAEA13C3839D5053CA59EE673F17750 via public servers.

When verifying releases please note that only the SHA256SUM file is signed with the GPG key. The following process should be more than satisfactory to verify the authenticity of any release.

Verifying Releases

Using the key downloaded from the public server or contained in this repository you should import the gpg key into your local key store.

gpg --import "rd@ena.com.asc"

Next, with the release archive, shasum and signature file downloaded you should verify integrity of the checksum file using the GPG signature.

gpg --verify consul-backinator-1.6.6-SHA256SUMS.sig consul-backinator-1.6.6-SHA256SUMS

Finally, ensure the downloaded archive matches the verified checksums file. Only downloaded archives in the current directory will be checked.

shasum -a 256 -c consul-backinator-1.5-SHA256SUMS

If the above steps completed without error you have a verified release!

Usage

Summary

ahurt$ ./consul-backinator --help
usage: consul-backinator [--version] [--help] <command> [<args>]

Available commands are:
    backup     Perform a backup operation
    dump       Dump a backup file
    restore    Perform a restore operation

Backup Options

Option	Description
file	The backup file target. The signature will be the same with a .sig extension appended. The default names are consul.bak and consul.bak.sig
key	The passphrase used for data encryption and signature generation. The default string password will be used if none specified. This should be a secure pseudo random string.
nokv	Do not attempt to backup kv data. This only makes sense if also passing the acls and/or queries option below.
acls	Optional backup filename or S3 location for acl tokens.
queries	Optional backup filename or S3 location for prepared queries.
transform	Optional argument that affects the key paths written to the backup file. See the transformation notes below for more information.
prefix	Optional argument that specifies the starting point for the backup tree. The default prefix is the root / prefix. To perform a partial tree backup specify a prefix.

Restore Options

Option	Description
file	The source file. The default is consul.bak
key	The passphrase used for data decryption and signature validation. This must match the key used when the backup was created.
nokv	Do not attempt to restore kv data. This only makes sense if also passing the acls option below.
acls	Optional source filename or S3 location for acl tokens.
queries	Optional source filename or S3 location for query definitions.
delete	Optionally delete all keys under the specified prefix prior to restoring the backup file. The default is false.
prefix	The prefix with the delete option. The default is / root. THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA IN YOUR KEYSTORE if not changed when using -delete.

Shared Consul Options (backup/restore)

Option	Description
addr	Optional consul agent address and port. The default is read from the CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR environment variable if specified or set to 127.0.0.1:8500.
scheme	Optional scheme http or https used when connecting to the consul agent. The default is set to https if the CONSUL_HTTP_SSL environment variable is set to true otherwise the default is http.
dc	Optional datacenter specification. The default value is the datacenter of the agent to which you are connecting.
token	Optional consul access token. The default value is read from the CONSUL_HTTP_TOKEN environment variable if specified.
ca-cert	Optional path to a PEM encoded CA cert file. This may also be a certificate bundle (concatenation of CA certificates).
client-cert	Optional path to a PEM encoded client certificate. This certificate must match the client key.
client-key	Optional path to an unencrypted PEM encoded private key. This key should obviously match the client cert. Passing this or client-cert alone will probably not work.
tls-skip-verify	Optional bool for verifying a TLS certificate. This is a very clear security risk and is not reccomended. This option alone has the same affect as the CONSUL_HTTP_SSL_VERIFY environment variable.

Dump Options

Option	Description
file	The source file. The default consul.bak will be used if not specified.
key	The passphrase for the backup file to be dumped. The default is password if not passed.
plain	Decrypt and dump the full raw payload contained within the backup file.
acls	Dump a limited set of data in a more concise format than the plain option above. This is only relevant for ACL backup files.
queries	Dump a limited set of data in a more concise format than the plain option above. This is only relevant for query backup files.

Transformations

Transformations are simple string operations and will affect the path anywhere there is a match. For example, passing -transform="foo,bar" would rewrite /apple/foo/key => /apple/bar/key as well as /orange/thing/foo/key => /orange/thing/bar/key. To avoid potential errors in transformations you should always use the most exact path possible. Using the previous example if you only wanted to affect keys under apple you should pass -transform="apple/foo,apple/bar" to prevent other paths from being modified inadvertently.

S3 Support

Support for S3 is implemented by passing an S3 URI to the standard -file option. The full format for the URI is as follows:

s3://access-key:secret-key@my-bucket/path/to/object?region=us-east-1&endpoint=my-s3gw:9000&secure=false

The minimal URI when using environment variables would be: s3://my-bucket/path/object

The current URI parsing accepts s3:// and s3n:// scheme prefixes.

This table describes all the S3 URI options and corresponding environment variables.

Paramater	Environment	Required	Description	Default
access-key	AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	yes	Your S3/AWS access key
secret-key	AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	yes	Your S3/AWS secret key
region	AWS_REGION	yes	Your S3/AWS region
endpoint		no	Optional endpoint	s3.amazonaws.com
secure		no	Optional secure flag	true
pathstyle		no	Optional pathstyle flag	false

Example

ahurt$ ./consul-backinator backup -key=superSecretStuff
2016/05/09 17:14:11 [Success] Backed up 289 keys from / to consul.bak
Keep your backup (consul.bak) and signature (consul.bak.sig) files in a safe place.
You will need both to restore your data.

ahurt$ ls -la *.sig *.bak
-rw-------  1 ahurt  staff  11167 May  9 17:14 consul.bak
-rw-------  1 ahurt  staff     44 May  9 17:14 consul.bak.sig

Thanks

• The HashiCorp folks for the excellent Consul service discovery daemon and the excellent embedded API and golang package. In addition to some very nice references back to this utility in a few issues.
• Adam Avilla for his time and contributions to the Docker portions of the build.
• All the other contributors, testers and stargazers.