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Setting up Pipelines via GitHub Machine Users

Of the two ways of installing Pipelines, we strongly encourage users to use GitHub App to install pipelines. However, if you're unable to use the app, or if you wish to setup machine users as a fallback then you can use this guide to setup authentication for pipeline via access tokens and machine users.

When using GitHub tokens Gruntwork recommends using CI users in Gruntwork Pipelines, separate from human users in your organization. Using a CI user ensures that a workflow won't break due to an employee leaving your company. Further, using CI users allow you to apply granular permissions that may normally be too restrictive for a normal employee to do their daily work.

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This guide will take approximately 30 minutes to complete.

Background​

Guidance on Storing Secrets​

During this setup, you will need to generate and securely store three GitHub tokens for two GitHub users. You will need a temporary location for these sensitive values between generating them and storing them in GitHub Actions. Do so according to your company's recommended security best practices (e.g., do not store them in Slack, a sticky note, etc., during this exercise.)

note

Your organization is required to rotate the GitHub tokens and update all GitHub secrets that use them.

tip

Gruntwork recommends that you use a password manager like 1Password to store these secrets securely.

caution

If you are screen sharing when generating these tokens, hide or pause your screen before selecting the Generate token button to prevent the token from being exposed.

GitHub Token Types​

GitHub has two types of tokens that can be generated:

  1. Classic tokens
  2. Fine-grained tokens

Classic Tokens​

Classic tokens have coarse granularity and for the most part grant similar access to the user that generated them.

The restrictions that can be applied to them are few, but they are still useful for some limited use cases.

In Pipelines, the ci-read-only-user will need a Classic token because it needs to access software across multiple GitHub organizations. This is something that classic tokens can do that fine-grained tokens cannot.

tip

The PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN token must be created as a Classic token.

Fine-grained​

Fine-grained tokens have more granular permissions, and are generally recommended over Classic tokens when they are applicable.

The only limitations on fine-grained tokens that are relevant from a Pipelines perspective is that:

  1. They have a single Resource owner, which is the organization that is allowed to access the token.
  2. They must have an expiration shorter than 1 year (Classic tokens can be configured to never expire).

In Pipelines, the ci-user will need two fine-grained tokens because they allow for very limited access to specific repositories, with minimal permissions to them.

tip

The INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN and ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN tokens must be created as fine-grained tokens.

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The Resource owner must be set to the GitHub organization of the repositories that the tokens will be used to access (e.g. infrastructure-live-root).

Resource ownerResource owner

tip

You might see your token status as pending after generating it. This is because some GitHub organizations require that fine-grained tokens be approved by an organization owner before they can be used.

If you have the appropriate access, you can approve your new token by navigating to the settings of your GitHub organization and finding the token in the Pending requests section.

More information can be found on that here.

Pending requestsPending requests

Creating machine users​

The recommended setup for Pipelines uses two machine users; one with the ability to open pull requests and run workflows on your behalf and another that can only has read access to repositories in GitHub. Restrictive permissions are then granted to each user, granting them requisite permissions to accomplish their tasks. This means that in order to actually run a pipeline job, both users may be involved at separate stages.

We’ll refer to this user as ci-user and ci-read-only-user, but you may name them anything you like. These users must:

  1. Both be members of your GitHub Organization
  2. Both be members of your team in Gruntwork’s GitHub Organization (See instructions on inviting a user to your team and linking the user’s GitHub ID to Gruntwork)
tip

We recommend creating two machine users for this use case, but you can adjust this based on your organization's needs. Ensure that the correct tokens are created and that the permissions for the machine users and tokens are appropriate for their required access.

Note that additional licenses in your GitHub subscription might be required if you are at capacity.

caution

There is a security implication to having one machine user for all the tokens generated here, as it would need to have write access to all repositories that the ci-user and ci-read-only-user need to access. This violates the security principle of least privilege access.

Make sure you are aware of trade-offs in security for convenience when making decisions related to this.

ci-user​

The ci-user orchestrates workflows, can open pull requests from automated code generation, and leave comments on pull requests. This user should have two GitHub Fine Grained Personal Access Tokens (PATs) with the following permissions.

Invite the ci-user to your repository

Invite the ci-user to your infrastructure-live-root and infrastructure-live-access-control repositories with write access.

Checklist:

Create the appropriate tokens for the ci-user

Create the following access tokens in the ci-user's GitHub account:

Checklist:

INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN​

INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN. This is a fine-grained GitHub Personal Access Token and will be used to grant GitHub Actions access to clone your infrastructure-live-root repository, open PRs, and create/update comments.

This token must have the following permissions to your infrastructure-live-root repo in your GitHub Organization:

  • Content read & write access
  • Issues read & write access
  • Metadata read access
  • Pull requests read & write access
  • Workflows read & write access

INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN PAT ConfigurationINFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN PAT Configuration

Why does this token need these permissions?

What follows is a breakdown of the permissions required by the INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN token, as per our testing, incrementally introducing more permissions to achieve the minimal set of permissions required to support Pipelines. Note that some permissions are specific to certain behavior, and some are only used by Enterprise customers.

If you are not an Enterprise customer, or don't want Pipelines to perform those specific behaviors, you can chose to not grant the corresponding permissions.

Content read & write access

This is required to clone infrastructure-live-root and push changes to it. The infrastructure-live-root repository updates itself in automated processes during account vending, and baselining. Without this permission, the pull request opened by the GitHub Actions workflow would not trigger the necessary automation to support account vending.

Issues read & write access

This is required to open issues. Pipelines will open issues when necessary to signal that manual intervention is required.

Metadata read access

This is required to read the repository metadata. This is added onto the token by default by GitHub when selecting the repo scope.

Pull requests read & write access

This is required to open pull requests. Pipelines opens pull requests to automate the process of introducing new Infrastructure as Code changes to drive infrastructure updates.

Workflows read & write access

This is required to update GitHub Action workflow files. When vending delegated repositories for Enterprise customers, Pipelines will create new repositories, including content in the .github/workflows directory. Without this permission, Pipelines would not be able to provision repositories with this content.

ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN​

ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN. This is a fine-grained GitHub Personal Access Token that will be used to initially bootstrap repositories vended as part of DevOps Foundations.

In addition, Enterprise customers will have it used during account vending to create new delegated infrastructure-live repositories in their GitHub Organization when vending AWS accounts with the isDelegated value selected.

tip

If you are not an Enterprise customer, you should delete it after DevOps Foundations setup.

This token must have the following permissions to all repositories the ci-user has access to in your GitHub Organization:

  • Administration read & write access
  • Contents read & write access
  • Metadata read access
  • Pull requests read & write access
  • Workflows read & write access

In addition, the token may require the following permissions in your organization:

  • Members read & write access

ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN PAT ConfigurationORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN PAT Configuration

Why does this token need these permissions?

What follows is a breakdown of the permissions required by the ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN token, as per our testing, incrementally introducing more permissions to achieve the minimal set of permissions required to support Pipelines. Note that some permissions are specific to certain behavior, and some are only used by Enterprise customers.

If you are not an Enterprise customer, or don't want Pipelines to perform those specific behaviors, you can chose to not grant the corresponding permissions.

Administration read & write access

This is required to create new repositories. Pipelines will create new repositories when vending delegated repositories for Enterprise customers. Without this permission, Pipelines would not be able to provision repositories.

Contents read & write access

This is required to read and write repository contents. This token is used for bootstrapping repositories by all customers, and to populate delegated repositories for Enterprise customers.

Metadata read access

This is required to read the repository metadata. This is added onto the token by default by GitHub when selecting the repo scope.

Pull requests read & write access

This is required to open pull requests. When vending delegated repositories for Enterprise customers, Pipelines will open pull requests to automate the process of introducing new Infrastructure as Code changes to drive infrastructure updates.

Workflows read & write access

This is required to update GitHub Action workflow files. When vending delegated repositories for Enterprise customers, Pipelines will create new repositories, including content in the .github/workflows directory. Without this permission, Pipelines would not be able to provision repositories with this content.

Members read & write access

This is required to update GitHub organization team members. When vending delegated repositories for Enterprise customers, Pipelines will add team members to a team that has access to a delegated repository. Without this permission, Pipelines would not be able to provision repositories that are accessible to the correct team members.

ci-read-only-user​

This user is created to download private software within GitHub Actions Workflows. The ci-read-only-user is used to access Gruntwork IaC Library modules, your own infrastructure-modules repository, any other custom module repositories that are private and the Pipelines CLI itself.

The ci-read-only-user should have a single classic Personal Access Token (PAT) with read permissions. Classic PATs have coarse granularity, we recommend putting this user in a GitHub team that only has READ access to infrastructure-live-root and any relevant module repositories in your own GitHub Organization. By adding this user to the Gruntwork Developer portal, they will automatically gain access to the Gruntwork IaC Library.

Invite the ci-read-only-user to your repository

Invite ci-user-read-only to your infrastructure-live-root repository with read access.

Checklist:

Create the appropriate tokens for the ci-read-only-user

Create the following token for the ci-read-only-user

Checklist:

PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN​

PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN. This Classic Personal Access Token will be used to manage access to private software during GitHub Action runs.

This token must have repo scopes.

PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN PAT ConfigurationPIPELINES_READ_TOKEN PAT Configuration

The expiration of this token is up to you and the security posture of your organization, Gruntwork recommends 90 days to reduce the burden of rotating tokens and secrets.

Invite both machine users to Gruntwork​

Ensure both of these machine users are members of your team in Gruntwork’s GitHub Organization (See instructions on inviting a user to your team and linking the user’s GitHub ID to Gruntwork)

Checklist:

Configure secrets for GitHub Actions​

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The recommended path for storing secrets in GitHub Actions is with Organization level secrets, however not all GitHub plans support repository specific Organization secrets. If this is the case for your GitHub organization, you should use Repository level secrets.

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Since this guide implements secrets that are scoped to specific repositories, anytime a new infrastructure-live repository is created, the permissions for these tokens will need to be updated.

Checklist:

  1. Navigate to your top level GitHub Organization and select the Settings tab.

  2. From the navigation bar on the left side, select Secrets and variables then select Actions.

  3. Using the New organization secret option, add the following secrets:

  • PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN

    1. This should be assigned the PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN token generated by the ci-read-only-user in the secrets section as its value.

    2. Repository access. Select the Private Repositories option.

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    The PIPELINES_READ_TOKEN token is made available to all private repositories so that every vended infrastructure-live repository automatically has access to this secret.

  • INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN

    1. This should be assigned the INFRA_ROOT_WRITE_TOKEN token generated by the ci-user in the secrets section as its value.

    2. Repository access. Using the Selected repositories option select the infrastructure-live-root repository.

  • ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN

    1. This should be assigned the ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN token generated by the ci-user in the secrets section as its value.

    2. Repository access. Using the Selected repositories option select the infrastructure-live-root and infrastructure-live-access-control repositories.

danger

After the bootstrap process is complete, you should clean up the ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN token by doing the following:

If you are not an Enterprise customer:

  • Delete the ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN Personal Access Token from the ci-user’s GitHub account
  • Delete the Organization secret ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN from the GitHub Organization

Enterprise customers:

  • Remove the infrastructure-live-access-control repository from the Selected repositories dropdown in the ORG_REPO_ADMIN_TOKEN GitHub Actions secret. This repository only needed the token for bootstrapping.
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For additional information on creating and using Github Actions Organization secrets, please refer to the GitHub Documentation.