GitHub Action to fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager and inject them as environment variables.

The injected environment variable names will only contain upper case letters, digits and underscores. It will not begin with a digit.

If your secret name contains any characters other than upper case letters, digits and underscores, it will not be used directly as the environment variable name. Rather, it will be transformed into a string that only contains upper case letters, digits and underscores.

For example:

• If your secret name is dev.foo, the injected environment variable name will be DEV_FOO.
• If your secret name is 1/dev/foo, the injected environment variable name will be _1_DEV_FOO.
• If your secret name is dev/foo, value is { "bar": "baz" } and parse_json is set to true, the injected environment variable name will be DEV_FOO_BAR (and value will be baz).

steps:
- name: Read secrets from AWS Secrets Manager into environment variables
  uses: action-factory/[email protected]
  with:
    aws_access_key_id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
    aws_secret_access_key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
    aws_region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
    secrets: |
      my_secret_1
      app1/dev/*
    parse_json: true

- name: Check if env variable is set after fetching secrets
  run: if [ -z ${MY_SECRET_1+x} ]; then echo "MY_SECRET_1 is unset"; else echo "MY_SECRET_1 is set to '$MY_SECRET_1'"; fi

• aws_access_key_id
  • Access Key ID of an IAM user with the required AWS Secrets Manager permissions.
  • Empty string can be used ONLY IF you are using a self-hosted GitHub Actions Runner on AWS EC2 instances with an IAM instance profile attached (should have the required AWS Secrets Manager permissions).
• aws_secret_access_key
  • Corresponding Secret Access Key of the IAM user.
  • Empty string can be used ONLY IF you are using a self-hosted GitHub Actions Runner on AWS EC2 instances with an IAM instance profile attached (should have the required AWS Secrets Manager permissions).
• aws_region
  • AWS region code which has your AWS Secrets Manager secrets.
  • Example: us-east-1.
• secrets:
  • List of secret names to be retrieved.
  • Examples:
    • To retrieve a single secret, use secrets: my_secret_1.
    • To retrieve multiple secrets, use:

      secrets: |
        my_secret_1
        my_secret_2

    • To retrieve "all secrets having names that contain dev" or "begin with app1/dev/", use:

      secrets: |
        *dev*
        app1/dev/*

• parse_json
  • If parse_json: true and secret value is a valid stringified JSON object, it will be parsed and flattened. Each of the key value pairs in the flattened JSON object will become individual secrets. The original secret name will be used as a prefix.
  • Examples:

• ${{ secrets.YOUR_SECRET_NAME }} refers to GitHub Secrets. Create the required secrets (e.g.: AWS credentials) in your GitHub repository before using this GitHub Action.
• If your secret name contains any characters other than upper case letters, digits and underscores, it will not be used directly as the environment variable name. Rather, it will be transformed into a string that only contains upper case letters, digits and underscores.

• Can fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager and inject them into environment variables which can be used in subsequent steps in your workflow.
• Injects environment variables in a format compatible with most shells.
• Can fetch multiple secrets at once.
• Supports wildcards
  • secrets: 'app1/dev/*' will fetch all secrets having names that begin with app1/dev/.
  • secrets: '*dev*' will fetch all secrets that have dev in their names.

The aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key provided by you should belong to an IAM user with the following minimum permissions:

• secretsmanager:GetSecretValue
• kms:Decrypt
  • Required only if you use a customer-managed AWS KMS key to encrypt the secret. You do not need this permission to use your account's default AWS managed encryption key for Secrets Manager.

If your secrets are encrypted using the default AWS managed encryption key, then the IAM user needs to have a policy attached similar to:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": [
                "secretsmanager:GetSecretValue"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

If your secrets are encrypted using a customer managed AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key, then the IAM user needs a policy similar to the one below. We can restrict access to specific secrets (resources) in a specific region or we can use * for 'Any'.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": [
                "secretsmanager:GetSecretValue",
                "kms:Decrypt"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": [
              "arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-1:000000000000:secret:*",
              "arn:aws:secretsmanager:*:000000000000:secret:mySecretID"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Here us-east-1 is the region code which has the secrets, 000000000000 is your AWS account ID and mySecretID is the ID of your secret (usually different from a secret name, refer to AWS Secrets Manager console for the exact ID).

We would love for you to contribute to @action-factory/aws-secrets-manager-action. Issues and Pull Requests are welcome!

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License.