The secrets provider can not be found

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hi, full disclosure, I’m new to gitlab, but I’ve hit a problem with the vault integration.

I’ve been setting it up with my installation following the documentation (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/authenticating-with-hashicorp-vault/index.html and https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/secrets/#use-vault-secrets-in-a-ci-job).
The vault integration documentation says that this is a premium feature so I’ve setup a trial license to see if it will work too.
I’ve successfully managed to get a secret out of my vault using the manual method listed in the docs here:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/authenticating-with-hashicorp-vault/index.html#example

I would prefer to be able to get the secret using the provided secrets: mechanism listed here:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/secrets/#use-vault-secrets-in-a-ci-job.

The problem I’m seeing is “The secrets provider can not be found” (see screenshot below).

Screenshot 2021-02-04 at 10.20.58
Screenshot 2021-02-04 at 10.20.582026×777 27.2 KB

My gitlab-ci.yml looks like this:

read_secrets:
image: 
    name: vault:1.6.2      
script:
    - export VAULT_ADDR=https://<my-domain.com>
    - export VAULT_TOKEN="$(vault write -field=token auth/jwt/login role=gitlab-ci jwt=$CI_JOB_JWT)"
    - echo $VAULT_TOKEN
    - echo $CI_JOB_JWT
    - vault status

    - echo $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
    - echo $CI_COMMIT_REF_PROTECTED
    - export PASSWORD="$(vault kv get -field=password gitlab/test)"
    # Use the secret
    - echo $PASSWORD
    - echo $DATABASE_PASSWORD
    
# not currently working:  
secrets:
    DATABASE_PASSWORD:
        vault: gitlab/test/password

Everything above secrets: works correctly and gets the secret out of the vault (I commented the secrets section out to test).

I was expecting that the secret would have been grabbed from the vault and displayed in the output.

My google foo has let me down on this one. Maybe it’s because of my noob status, is there’s any other documentation that I’ve missed, or does somebody know what the issue is here?

Thanks

Gitlab version 13.8 (self managed)

2

Hi

I tried the same and got the same error in the UI (“The secrets provider can not be found”)
But if I set under Settings → CI/CD → Environment variables

VAULT_AUTH_PATH
VAULT_AUTH_ROLE
VAULT_SERVER_URL

I could trigger the pipeline again and I got one step further.

3

That message usually means you don’t have VAULT_SERVER_URL set as CI/CD variable.

Make sure you have the required Variables set:
VAULT_SERVER_URL
VAULT_AUTH_ROLE (optional)
VAULT_AUTH_PATH (optional)

Make sure that the variables are available to your branch/environment. It won’t work if you have the variables set as Protected and running it on non-protected branch or MR pipeline.

Try something like this:

stages:
  - checkvars
  - readsecret

print variables:
  stage: checkvars
  script:
    - echo $VAULT_SERVER_URL
    - echo $VAULT_AUTH_ROLE
    - echo $VAULT_AUTH_PATH

read secret:
  stage: readsecret
  secrets:
    DATABASE_PASSWORD:
        vault: gitlab/test/password
  script:
    - echo $DATABASE_PASSWORD
    - cat $DATABASE_PASSWORD