Secrets Managers

HashiCorp Vault Secrets Manager

Use Vault Secrets Manager to store credentials used to authenticate access to external services. The credentials are stored in a Vault instance and can be encrypted at rest. To store credentials in a Vault instance, you can read the official Vault docs Storing secrets in Vault.

You can also encrypt credentials at rest with Vault Transit Engine.

Note

Expiring tokens need to be renewed periodically, and the renewal process is done over the network, Rasa Pro will try to renew the token 15 seconds before it expires. If the token's time-to-live (TTL) is less than 15 seconds, we will try to renew it after 1 second, but it might fail due to network latency.

Rasa Pro has a built-in retry mechanism for renewing the token. If the token is not renewed successfully it will be considered expired and Rasa Pro will not be able to access the secrets. You will need to create a new renewable token and restart Rasa Pro with a new token.

Authentication

Rasa Pro can authenticate to Vault through Token authentication.

Both expiring and non-expiring (so-called, root tokens) are supported. Rasa Pro will automatically renew the token if it is expiring.

How to configure access to Vault

Access to Vault secrets manager can be configured with environment variables and through endpoints.yml configuration file.

Environment variables and endpoints.yml configuration file are merged together and the values from the environment variables take precedence.

The following environment variables are available:

To configure the Vault secrets manager, you can fill the following section in endpoints.yml file:

secrets_manager:
  type: vault # required - the secrets manager to use
  token: <token># required - token to authenticate to the vault server
  url: "http://localhost:1234"# required - the address of the vault server
  secrets_path: rasa-secrets # path to the secrets in the vault server if not set it defaults to `rasa-secrets`
  transit_mount_point: transit # if transit secrets engine is enabled, set this to mount point of the transit engine

Store access credentials in environment variables

A simple example on how to combine environment variables and endpoints.yml configuration file would be to store access token in the environment variable and the rest of the configuration in the endpoints.yml file.

# environment variables
VAULT_TOKEN=<token used to authenticate to Vault>

secrets_manager:
  type: vault
  url: "http://localhost:1234"
  secrets_path: rasa-secrets # if not set it defaults to `rasa-secrets`
  transit_mount_point: transit # if you have enabled transit secrets engine, and you want to use it

How to configure Tracker Store with Vault Secrets Manager

1. Configure Rasa to access the Vault instance

Checkout the How to configure access to Vault section for more details.

2. Configure Rasa to use the Vault secrets manager to fetch credentials for the tracker store

tracker_store:
  type: SQL
  url: localhost:5432
  username:
    source: secrets_manager.vault
    secret_key: sql_store_username
  password:
    source: secrets_manager.vault
    secret_key: sql_store_password