Adding documentation for basic usage

This change adds a few samples of the basic usage of Castellan
including; storing, retrieving, and deleting managed objects.

Change-Id: I640f076447da47a57d5186e46b49193e1172d64a
This commit is contained in:
Michael McCune 2015-08-19 19:21:10 -04:00
parent 3f4292592a
commit 82a0ded5c8
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Usage
========
To use castellan in a project::
This document describes some of the common usage patterns for Castellan. When
incorporating this package into your applications, care should be taken to
consider the key manager behavior you wish to encapsulate and the OpenStack
deployments on which your application will run.
import castellan
Basic usage
~~~~~~~~~~~
Castellan works on the principle of providing an abstracted key manager based
on your configuration. In this manner, several different management services
can be supported through a single interface.
In addition to the key manager, Castellan also provides primitives for
various types of secrets (for example, asymmetric keys, simple passphrases,
and certificates). These primitives are used in conjuction with the key
manager to create, store, retrieve, and destroy managed secrets.
Another fundamental concept to using Castellan is the context object, most
frequently inherited from ``oslo.context.RequestContext``. This object
represents information that is contained in the current request, and is
usually populated in the WSGI pipeline. The information contained in this
object will be used by Castellan to interact with the specific key manager
that is being abstracted.
**Example. Creating and storing a key.**
.. code:: python
import myapp
from castellan.common.objects import passphrase
from castellan import key_manager
key = passphrase.Passphrase('super_secret_password')
manager = key_manager.API()
stored_key_id = manager.store(myapp.context(), key)
To begin with, we'd like to create a key to manage. We create a simple
passphrase key, then instantiate the key manager, and finally store it to
the manager service. We record the key identifier for later usage.
**Example. Retrieving a key and checking the contents.**
.. code:: python
import myapp
from castellan import key_manager
manager = key_manager.API()
key = manager.store(myapp.context(), stored_key_id)
if key.get_encoded() == 'super_secret_password':
myapp.do_secret_stuff()
This example demonstrates retrieving a stored key from the key manager service
and checking its contents. First we instantiate the key manager, then
retrieve the key using a previously stored identifier, and finally we check
the validity of key before performing our restricted actions.
**Example. Deleting a key.**
.. code:: python
import myapp
from castellan import key_manager
manager = key_manager.API()
manager.delete(myapp.context(), stored_key_id)
Having finished our work with the key, we can now delete it from the key
manager service. We once again instantiate a key manager, then we simply
delete the key by using its identifier. Under normal conditions, this call
will not return anything but may raise exceptions if there are communication,
identification, or authorization issues.
Configuring castellan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~