HOWTO: Installing Vault On an AWS Ubuntu EC2 server

This is quick howto for installing vault on AWS Linux, mostly to remind myself. At the end of this tutorial, you'll have a working vault server, using s3 for the backend, self signed certificates for tls, and supervisord to ensure that the vault server is always running, and starts on reboot.

Setting up S3

First things first, let's set up an s3 bucket to use as the storage backend for our s3 instance.

From the AWS Mangement Console, go to the S3 console.
Click on the Create Bucket button
Name it something

IAM Stuff

Next, let's create an IAM Policy with full access to our newly created bucket. We'll also create an IAM Role and IAM User in this step, but this should not be neccessary once Vault v5 is released.

From the AWS Management Console, go the IAM console.
Click on Policies in the sidenav
Click on Create Policy
Select S3 from the service section
Select All Actions (s3:*) from the Actions section
Open the Resources section and select Add ARN in the bucket section
Enter: arn:aws:s3:::<your_bucket_name>
Add another ARN: arn:aws:s3:::<your_bucket_name>/* (this is required to let vault manage all keys within the bucket)
Click Review Policy
Give the policy a name: s3-vault-full-access
Click Create Policy

Next, we create an IAM Role and attach our policy to it. We will use this role as the EC2 instance role later on.

Click on Roles in the side nav
Click Create Role
Under Create Role, select AWS Service and then EC2, then click Next: Permissions
Find our newly created s3-vault-full-access policy, select it and click Next: Tags
Add tags, if you want, then click Next: Review
Give the role a name: vault-ec2
Lastly, click Create Role

Create a vault user

Click on Users from the side nav
Click on Add User
Enter a username: vault
Select Programmatic access from the Select AWS access type section
Click Next: Permissions
Click Attach existing policies directly
Select the s3-vault-full-access policy.
Click Next: Tags, then Next: Review
Click Create User
Save/download the security credentials on the next screen and click Close
Back to the Users screen, and click on our newly created user

Launch EC2

Ok, now it's time to launch an ec2 that will act as our Vault server.

From the AWS Management Console, go to the EC2 console.
Click Launch Instance
Select the most recent Ubuntu Server LTS
Select an appropriate size, for this tutorial, I'll use a t2.nano
Click Next: Configure Instance Details
Under IAM role, select the IAM Role we created earlier (s3-vault-full-access)
Click Next: Add Storage
The default storage is fine, so click Next: Add Tags
Add tags, if you want
Click Next: Configure Security Group
Give your security group a name: vault
Give your security group a description: vault server security group
Click Add Rule
Select Custom TCP Rule and define a port range: 8200
Under source, for the purposes of this tutorial, select My IP. However, in production, you should restrict this port to the security groups of the servers that require access to vault.
Click Review and Launch
Click Launch
If you have an existing key-pair, you can use it, or create a new one and download it
Lastly, click Launch Instances and then View Instances

Assign a domain to the EC2 instance

Use your preferred method for pointing a domain (e.g. vault.netsensia.com) to your new EC2 instance.

Generating a Let's Encrypt certificate

Temporarily enable inbound ports 80 and 443 from Anywhere, and port 22 from your local machine
Login to the EC2 box using your generated key: e.g. ssh -i ~/Downloads/vault-key.pem [email protected]
Run the following commands

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo git clone https://github.com/certbot/certbot /opt/letsencrypt
cd /etc
sudo mkdir letsencrypt
cd
wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
chmod a+x certbot-auto
./certbot-auto certonly --standalone --debug -d YOUR_DOMAIN
sudo bash
chown ubuntu:ubuntu /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR_DOMAIN/*.pem

Remove the inbound rules added in step 1

Note that you will need to re-instate the inbound rules to renew the certificate.

Have a job set to run each day with the following command to avoid the certicate expiring after three months, or, alternatively, wait for it to expire and then run the command.

You will need to ensure that no services such as web servers are running on port 443.

Installing Vault

Once the instance has finished initializing, it's time to download the Vault binary and unpack it.

update the instance

sudo apt-get -y update

install Vault (find the latest binary on the vault project page)

cd
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/vault/1.1.0/vault_1.1.0_linux_amd64.zip

unzip it

sudo apt-get install unzip
unzip vault_1.1.0_linux_amd64.zip

move the binary

sudo mv vault /usr/local/bin/vault

verify that Vault is ready to go

vault version

create the vault configuration file

touch vault-config.hcl

edit the file

vi vault-config.hcl

define the vault configuration like so.

listener "tcp" {
    address = "0.0.0.0:8200"
    tls_cert_file="/home/ec2-user/.ssl/server.crt"
    tls_key_file="/home/ec2-user/.ssl/server.key"
}

backend "s3" {
    bucket = "<your_bucket_name>"
    region = "eu-west-2"
}

disable_mlock=true

Installing supervisord

Next, we install supervisord, which will simplify the whole "let's get Vault running as a service, and have it start on reboot, blah blah blah"

install supervisor

sudo apt-get install -y supervisor

create a new supervisord configuration file

echo_supervisord_conf > supervisord.conf

modify the configuration file
- under [unix_http_server]
  - change ;chmod=0700 to chmod=0766
- change the ;[program:theprogramname] header to [program:vault]
- under [program:vault]
  - change ;command=/bin/cat to command=/usr/local/bin/vault server -config=/home/ubuntu/vault-config.hcl
  - change ;user=chrism to user=ubuntu
  - change ;autostart=true to autostart=true
  - change ;environment=A="1",B="2" to environment=AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<your_access_key_id>",AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<your_secret_access_key>", where <your_access_key_id> and <your_secret_access_key> are the credentials you downloaded/wrote down when we created the vault user.
Move the file

sudo mv supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/

add the supervisor init script to chkconfig services

sudo update-rc.d supervisord defaults

start the supervisord service

sudo service supervisor start
supervisorctl

Initialise the vault

Exit out of the Linux VM

exit

Create a key, require only the one key to unseal the vault.

export VAULT_ADDR=<vault url>:8200
vault init -key-shares=1 -key-threshold=1

chris-moreton/howto-installing-vault-on-aws-linux.md