googleapis / google-auth-library-nodejs

🔑 Google Auth Library for Node.js
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Use ENVAR for service account impersonation #1763

Open rhodgkins opened 7 months ago

rhodgkins commented 7 months ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Simpler, environment wide way to impersonate a service account across multiple client libraries during development when my the local machines ADC is set to a user google account (or a service account) with permissions to act as the specified service account. Google's best practices also recommend service account impersonation.

Describe the solution you'd like To use an envar to specify a service account email to be used for client library authentication.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I've already raised this in @google-cloud/common, but thought I'd re-raise here as this library seems to be a bit more active.

I was thinking as something as simple as checking for an envar when loading up the ADC and creating an Impersonated auth client here https://github.com/googleapis/google-auth-library-nodejs/blob/151513131f6256d381480b49bdfadf692a336d3d/src/auth/googleauth.ts#L352-L370

  async _tryGetApplicationCredentialsFromEnvironmentVariable(
    options?: RefreshOptions
  ): Promise<JSONClient | null> {
    const credentialsPath =
      process.env['GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS'] ||
      process.env['google_application_credentials'];
    if (!credentialsPath || credentialsPath.length === 0) {
      // Check if we're trying to impersonate a service account with envar
      if (process.env.CLOUDSDK_AUTH_IMPERSONATE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT) {
        return new Impersonated({
          ...options,
          targetPrincipal: process.env.CLOUDSDK_AUTH_IMPERSONATE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT,
          targetScopes: ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform'],
        })
      }
      return null;
    }
    try {
      return this._getApplicationCredentialsFromFilePath(
        credentialsPath,
        options
      );
    } catch (e) {
      e.message = `Unable to read the credential file specified by the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable: ${e.message}`;
      throw e;
    }
  }

I've used the gcloud envar for service account impersonation just for an example. Also I've noticed gcloud logs out warnings when using the --impersonated-service-account option - that could be added here too, to warn the user what's happening?

Note - I'm still not sure if this should be raised here or in @google-cloud/common as previously mentioned, but I feel it would probably be more useful if it could be done at the google-auth-library level as then if you created a GoogleAuth it would automatically be impersonated auth client across the board.

Jake7D commented 3 months ago

We have a similar scenario where we want to use impersonated service accounts to run tests in a containerised environment. We've tried a few things to get it working, but it seems currently the only way to do it is by adding additional code in for impersonating (which we avoid at all costs).

Any update on whether this is likely to be implemented?