Managing secret data

Puppet often needs to know your secrets; for example, passwords, private keys, and other credentials need to be configured on the node, and Puppet must have access to this information. The problem is how to make sure that no-one else does. If you are checking this data into a Git repo, it will be available to anybody who has access to the repo, and if it's a public GitHub repo, everybody in the world can see it.

Clearly, it's essential to be able to encrypt secret data in such a way that Puppet can decrypt it on individual nodes where it's needed, but it's indecipherable to anybody who does not have the key. The popular GnuPG encryption tool is a good choice for this. It lets you encrypt data using a public key which can be distributed widely, but only someone with the corresponding private key can decrypt the information.

Hiera has a pluggable backend system which allows it to support various different ways of storing data. One such backend is called hiera-eyaml-gpg,...