What is OpenBao Agent?
OpenBao Agent aims to remove the initial hurdle to adopt OpenBao by providing a more scalable and simpler way for applications to integrate with OpenBao, by providing the ability to render templates containing the secrets required by your application, without requiring changes to your application.
OpenBao Agent is a client daemon that provides the following features:
- Auto-Auth - Automatically authenticate to OpenBao and manage the token renewal process for locally-retrieved dynamic secrets.
- API Proxy - Allows OpenBao Agent to act as a proxy for OpenBao's API, optionally using (or forcing the use of) the Auto-Auth token.
- Caching - Allows client-side caching of responses containing newly created tokens and responses containing leased secrets generated off of these newly created tokens. The agent also manages the renewals of the cached tokens and leases.
- Windows Service - Allows running the OpenBao Agent as a Windows service.
- Templating - Allows rendering of user-supplied templates by OpenBao Agent, using the token generated by the Auto-Auth step.
- Process Supervisor Mode - Runs a child process with OpenBao secrets injected as environment variables.
Auto-Auth
OpenBao Agent allows easy authentication to OpenBao in a wide variety of environments. Please see the Auto-Auth docs for information.
Auto-Auth functionality takes place within an auto_auth
configuration stanza.
API proxy
OpenBao Agent can act as an API proxy for OpenBao, allowing you to talk to OpenBao's API via a listener defined for Agent. It can be configured to optionally allow or force the automatic use of the Auto-Auth token for these requests. Please see the API Proxy docs for more information.
API Proxy functionality takes place within a defined listener
, and its behaviour can be configured with an
api_proxy
stanza.
Caching
OpenBao Agent allows client-side caching of responses containing newly created tokens and responses containing leased secrets generated off of these newly created tokens. Please see the Caching docs for information.