I run a very cheap home serv­er. How cheap? Very, very cheap. Sub Rasp­ber­ry Pi 4 cheap.

It runs a ton of ser­vices, and it al­so works as my "Func­tion­s" serv­er.

What is a func­tions server?

It's a cheap man's AWS Lamb­da which al­lows me to cre­ate small "ser­vices" like this, and de­ploy them au­to­mat­i­cal­ly. It's re­al­ly a game chang­er for sim­ple code avail­abil­i­ty, and it's my favourite way to share func­tion­al­i­ty with oth­er­s.

But some­times a ser­vice re­lies on a 3rd par­ty API, and it needs things like a to­ken to be avail­able. Faasd sup­ports this us­ing their se­cret API. You cre­ate a se­cret like this:

faas-cli secret create whatever

And when you declare in your functions.yml that your function needs a secret:

myfunc:
  lang: python3-fastapi
  handler: ./myfunc
  secrets:
  - whatever

Your code reads a file in /var/openfaas/secrets/whatever and that's all, there is a secret on the server, your app can see it, it's not in the app's code, all good.

Ex­cept ... what hap­pens if you need to re­de­ploy faas­d? You will need to cre­ate the se­cret again! So you need to keep the se­cret some­where.

So­lu­tion: pass

I already use pass to keep many passwords, it's easy to also put secrets there. It manages everything using a git repo, so it's a known factor. You can even do things like add them all inside a faasd/ folder and then recreate them using scripts, like this:

pass faasd/whatever | faas-cli secret create whatever

pass will ask for your mas­ter passphrase, se­cret cre­at­ed. You can even pub­lish your pass re­po since ev­ery­thing in it is en­crypt­ed with gpg, so no­body can re­al­ly read it (don't do that).

So, this so­lu­tion us­es:

• pass
• gpg
• git
• faasd
• shell
• what­ev­er lan­guage and frame­work you use in your code

And ev­ery­thing is seam­less!

I think this is a nice ex­am­ple of how ran­dom tools can con­nect with each oth­er be­cause they all fol­low the unix con­ven­tion about mov­ing things around as tex­t.