How to inject a secret into the environment via a systemd service definition?

Hey @XIII, thanks for reaching out to us!

I think another solution here might be to pass the secret references as environment variables, and to use op run to prefix your ExecStart Command. I played a bit with this with the manual authentication process, hardcoding my session token, and managed to get something like this working:

[Service]
User=horia
Environment="OP_CONFIG_DIR=/home/horia/.config/op"
Environment="VAR=op://test-vault/docker/username"
Environment="OP_SESSION_<my_id>=<my_session_token>"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/op run --no-masking -- bash -c 'echo $VAR'

I assume this can be ported over to the biometric authentication process as well, but, in case you encounter any hurdles, let us know such that we can take another look, in more detail!

Best,
Horia

That's exactly what I (already) did... (and that indeed works!)

However, this service's ExecStart is pretty complicated; I'd rather not overwrite that (since I manually have to copy the original one each time the author changes it).

Turns out this does not work as good as I hoped, I always get these errors when I try to restart a service:


Apr 10 17:06:32 pi systemd[1]: my.service: Found left-over process 1944 (op) in control group while starting unit. Ignoring.
Apr 10 17:06:32 pi systemd[1]: This usually indicates unclean termination of a previous run, or service implementation deficiencies.


How to fix this?

Might be because this service was using this (which is not recommended):


KillMode=process


Removed that line (to get the default mode control-group) and that seems to work better (so far).

I am glad you got this working. Is there anything else that we can help with, here?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best,
Horia

Hi @XIII ! Another option is to write the secret into a private temp file and read it from there into your app. This is secure because systemd creates private temp files in a separate application-specific namespace. In fact by some accounts it's even more secure than environment variables, which can be queried pretty easily from other processes!

My suggestion would look like:

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/path/to/op read op://Vault/Item/password >/tmp/item
ExecStart=/some/app # reads file /tmp/item contents into memory as password
PrivateTmp=yes # Enforces creating /tmp/* in private namespace for the service

Thanks for sharing @sKCZWuLeiGrwVP!