Google Authentication Chef Cookbook

Module Description

This cookbook provides the resources to authenticate with Google Cloud Platform.

When executing operations on Google Cloud Platform, e.g. creating a virtual machine, a SQL database, etc., you need to be authenticated to be able to carry on with the request.

All Google Cloud Platform cookbooks use an unified authentication mechanism, provided by this cookbook.

Example

gauth_credential 'mycred' do
  action :serviceaccount
  path '/home/nelsonjr/my_account.json'
  scopes [
    'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/compute'
  ]
end

Setup

To install this cookbook using knife tool:

knife cookbook site install google-gauth
knife cookbook site download google-gauth

Note: Google Cloud Platform cookbooks that require authentication will automatically install this cookbook, as it will be listed in their dependencies.

Platforms

Supported Operating Systems

This cookbook was tested on the following operating systems:

• RedHat 6, 7
• CentOS 6, 7
• Debian 7, 8
• Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, 16.04, 16.10
• SLES 11-sp4, 12-sp2
• openSUSE 13
• Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2012 R2 Core, 2016 R2, 2016 R2 Core

About Service Accounts

This cookbook uses service accounts to authenticate with Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform project administrators manage service accounts. They can create, modify and delete accounts and grant account specific privileges on the projects. Those privileges will be used by Chef to carry on the operations on behalf of the user.

Getting a Service Account key

The provider uses the JSON version of the service account key file. When in the IAM & Admin section of the Developer Console the administrator can retrieve a key file. Select the JSON as the key format.

The file you download is the one provided in the path property.

Providers

gauth_credential

provider

• serviceaccount [preferred] This is the preferred method of specifying credentials, because it does not rely on any pre-existing system configuration that Chef can't track. You'll need a credential file, but you can easily manage that with a file do .. end resource.

• defaultuseraccount If you have gcloud setup you can piggyback on the account currently set as active for the user running Chef.

  Warning! Please be aware that the account is subject to whichever account is set as active on gcloud tool, so the results will not be always consistent if they change under Chef by the user.

scopes

The scopes your authentication request will be limited to. When executing actions against Google Cloud Platform you should choose the minimum amount of privileges to carry on the operations to avoid accidentally affecting other resources. For example if I want to manage virtual machines you should request only "Compute R/W". That way you don't accidentally modify your DNS records.

Google's Chef cookbooks for Google Cloud Platform list the scopes you can use in their Chef Supermarket documentation page. You can alternatively look at Google Cloud Platform documentation for the product you're interacting with.

A few examples:

<table> <tr> <th>Product</th> <th colspan='2'>Scope</th> </tr> <tr> <td>Compute Engine (VMs, Disks, ...)</td> <td>Read Write</td> <td><code>https://www.googleapis.com/auth/compute</code></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cloud SQL</td> <td>Read Write</td> <td><code>https://www.googleapis.com/auth/sqlservice.admin</code></td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan='2'>Cloud DNS</td> <td>Read Only</td> <td><code>https://www.googleapis.com/auth/ndev.clouddns.readonly</code></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Read Write</td> <td><code>https://www.googleapis.com/auth/ndev.clouddns.readwrite</code></td> </tr> </table>

path

If you specify the serviceaccount provider this property points to an absolute path of the service account file (in JSON format).