jsecrets

jsecrets lets you fetch and use secrets from AWS Secrets Manager in your JavaScript projects. jsecrets is built and maintained by Pixie Labs.

You may want to use this if you use AWS Secrets Manager to store encrypted credentials, e.g. for your database, or for accessing an API with a token, and need to access those credentials in a backend JavaScript application e.g. an Express server, Lambda function, or some other backend piece of code.

Install

Add the package to your package.json with either NPM or Yarn:

# With NPM: 
$ npm i -S jsecrets
# With Yarn: 
$ yarn add jsecrets

Fetching secrets

jsecrets expects that your secrets are JSON objects stored in AWS Secrets Manager as strings.

// app.js
const jsecrets = require("jsecrets");
 
try {
  // Fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager with jsecrets.fetch(), passing in
  // the region and an array of secret IDs. The secret ID can be the Amazon
  // Resource Name (ARN) or the "friendly name" of the secret.
  await jsecrets.fetch("eu-west-2", ["databaseSecret", "anotherSecret"]);
 
  // Once the secrets have been retrieved, individual values can be extracted by
  // passing in the name of the secret and the key to jsecrets.get().
  const database = jsecrets.get("databaseSecret", "database");
  const username = jsecrets.get("databaseSecret", "username");
  const password = jsecrets.get("databaseSecret", "password");
  const options = {
    host: jsecrets.get("databaseSecret", "host"),
    dialect: "postgres"
  };
 
  // You might then use those secrets to configure a DB connection, such as:
  const sequelize = new Sequelize(database, username, password, options);
 
  // The rest of your app goes here.
 
} catch (e) {
  console.log(e.message);
}

Stubbing jsecrets in development

jsecrets has a helper method making it easy to stub calls to AWS when you are developing your application, and so don't need to use production secrets. Immediately after the import, call jsecrets.devStubs() passing in an object with the same shape as your secrets.The stubs will be used in all circumstances.

Wrap the call to jsecrets.devStubs() in a if block to ensure devStubs() is not called in production.

If you have multiple secrets, you can pass them all into jsecrets.devStubs() at once.

For example:

const jsecrets = require('jsecrets');
 
if (process.env.NODE_ENV != 'production') {
  // Stub the return values of jsecrets.get() unless the app is running in
  // production.
  jsecrets.devStubs({
    'databaseSecret': {
      'database': 'jsecrets_node_app',
      'host': 'localhost',
      'username': 'pixielabs',
      'password': 'pixielabs_secrets'
    },
    'anotherSecret': {
      'jwt_signing_key': 'jsecret_signing',
      'jwt_client_key': 'jsecret_client'
    }
  })
}
 
try {
  // Fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager with jsecrets.fetch()
  await jsecrets.fetch("eu-west-2", ["databaseSecret", "anotherSecret"]);

Errors

All errors returned by jsecrets will have a message key.

If the error is from AWS then there will also be other keys such as code, time and statusCode.

Contributing

Running the tests

Unit tests can be run with:

$ npm test

Feature tests are part of the example Express app within the exampleApp folder:

$ npm run exampleAppStart

In a new terminal:

$ npm run exampleAppTest

Before contributing, please read the code of conduct.

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet.
• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it.
• Fork the project.
• Start a feature/bugfix branch.
• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
• Please try not to mess with the package.json, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so we can cherry-pick around it.