GitHub App Secret Refresher

Where you can get GitHub App Installation Access Tokens that are so FRESH, it hurts...

Overview

When developing utilities for GitHub, several apps may require to use the GitHub API or require authentication pull from a git repo on GitHub. GitHub App's private keys do not have access to pull code directly nor speak to GitHub APIs directly and require a temporary Installation Access Token which expires every hour.

Some apps like Flux and BuildKite do not directly support GitHub app authentication and only support SSH keys, Deploy Tokens or Personal Access Tokens to authenticate. These tools can use a GitHub App Installation Access Token to authenticate if they can have a readily available token at all times.

Optionally, GitHub app installation tokens can be scoped to have specific permissions compared to other keys. This includes limiting the repositories that the token has access to and granted permissions to the repository. This provides security so that if a service using the token is pwned, the token (1) expires within one hour and (2) is scoped to a limited set of permissions versus an entire organization's source.

How it works?

GitHub App Secret Refresher runs as a job on Kubernetes.

Installation

We have a helm v3 manifest that can be used to install the job on Kubernetes. In the root of this repository run the following command after replacing the values specified:

helm install -n <namespace> --name-template github-app-secret-refresher \
  --set githubAppPrivateKeyBase64=<base-64-github-app-private-key> \
  --set githubAppId=<app-id> \
  --set githubAppInstallationId=<installation-id> \
  --set jobSchedule="*/20 * * * *" 

The above command will schedule the job to create and update a secret called github-credentials within its namespace every 20 minutes.

Cleanup

helm uninstall -n <namespace> github-app-secret-refresher

Supported Processor Types

In the future, there may be multiple processor types such as webhooks, AWS Secret Manager, or more depending on how your service may access the secret.

Kubernetes Secret

Periodically creates and updates a Kubernetes Secret within the Job's namespace with a token field which contains an Installation Access Token for authenticating to git or GitHub API.

Name:         github-credentials
Namespace:    test
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>

Type:  Opaque

Data
====
token:  56 bytes

TODO List

• Remove GitHub App client and use raw API to generate a scoped token
• Create a Target Namespace so that the Job may run outside of the k8s namespace of which the secret or services live
• Be able to specify multiple target formats (oauth, custom, k8s image pull secret, etc)
• Introduce more processor types (WEBHOOK, AWS Secret Manager, etc)