Private CA Formula

Manage a private Certificate Authority with Salt.

Note that this formula contains rewritten x509 modules which will become available in Salt v3006 by default. See #63099.

Table of Contents

• General notes
• Special notes
• Configuration
• Available states
• Contributing to this repo
• Testing

General notes

See the full SaltStack Formulas installation and usage instructions.

If you are interested in writing or contributing to formulas, please pay attention to the Writing Formula Section.

If you want to use this formula, please pay attention to the FORMULA file and/or git tag, which contains the currently released version. This formula is versioned according to Semantic Versioning.

See Formula Versioning Section for more details.

If you need (non-default) configuration, please refer to:

• how to configure the formula with map.jinja
• the pillar.example file
• the Special notes section

Special notes

• One parameter is required: pca:ca:minion_id.
• To make full use of your private CA, make sure to allow peer communication in your Salt master configuration:

peer:
  # you can restrict this with minion ID globbing
  .*:
    - x509.sign_remote_certificate

• You will also need to define x509_signing_policies in your CA minion config/pillar. See the state module documentation for further details.

Configuration

An example pillar is provided, please see pillar.example. Note that you do not need to specify everything by pillar. Often, it's much easier and less resource-heavy to use the parameters/<grain>/<value>.yaml files for non-sensitive settings. The underlying logic is explained in map.jinja.

Available states

The following states are found in this formula:

• pca
• pca.base
• pca.ca
• pca.clean

pca

Always ensures the Salt CA is present in the system's CA bundle and thus trusted.

If the configured CA minion's ID matches this minion's ID, includes pca.ca as well.

pca.base

Ensures an existing Salt CA is trusted. Pulls the root certificate to trust from the mine.

Should work for Linux/BSD and MacOS. For the latter, this requires the macprofile module, which will install the necessary profile interactively.

pca.ca

Configures a certificate authority:

• creates a root certificate or a CSR, if not ca:self_signed
• if not ca:self_signed, saves the configured root certificate
• publishes the root certificate to the mine

pca.clean

Does nothing currently.

Contributing to this repo

Commit messages

Commit message formatting is significant!

Please see How to contribute for more details.

pre-commit

pre-commit is configured for this formula, which you may optionally use to ease the steps involved in submitting your changes. First install the pre-commit package manager using the appropriate method, then run bin/install-hooks and now pre-commit will run automatically on each git commit.

$ bin/install-hooks
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/commit-msg

State documentation

There is a script that semi-autodocuments available states: bin/slsdoc.

If a .sls file begins with a Jinja comment, it will dump that into the docs. It can be configured differently depending on the formula. See the script source code for details currently.

This means if you feel a state should be documented, make sure to write a comment explaining it.

Testing

Linux testing is done with kitchen-salt.

Requirements

• Ruby
• Docker

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
$ bin/kitchen test [platform]

Where [platform] is the platform name defined in kitchen.yml, e.g. debian-9-2019-2-py3.

bin/kitchen converge

Creates the docker instance and runs the pca main state, ready for testing.

bin/kitchen verify

Runs the inspec tests on the actual instance.

bin/kitchen destroy

Removes the docker instance.

bin/kitchen test

Runs all of the stages above in one go: i.e. destroy + converge + verify + destroy.

bin/kitchen login

Gives you SSH access to the instance for manual testing.