Configure Stack Components using Secrets

How to reference secrets when configuring stack components

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Some of the components in your stack require you to configure them with sensitive information like passwords or tokens so they can connect to the underlying infrastructure. Secret references allow you to configure these components in a secure way by not specifying the value directly but instead referencing a secret. To reference a secret in any string attribute of your stack components, simply specify the attribute value using the following syntax:

{{<SECRET_NAME>.<SECRET_KEY>}}

For example:

zenml metadata-store register secure_metadata_store \
    --flavor=mysql \
    --username='{{mysql_secret.username}}' \
    --password='{{mysql_secret.password}}' \
    ...

Register missing secrets for your stack

When using components with secret references in your stack, you need to make sure that the stack contains a secrets manager and all the referenced secrets exist in this secrets manager. To make this process easier, you can use the following CLI command to interactively register all secrets for a stack:

zenml stack register-secrets [<STACK_NAME>]

Secret validation

Before running a pipeline, ZenML will validate your stack and make sure that all secrets and keys referenced in your stack components exist. This helps us fail early so your pipeline doesn't fail after running for some time due to some missing secret.

This validation by default needs to fetch and read every secret to make sure that both the secret and the specified key-value pair exist. This can take quite some time and might fail if you don't have the permissions to read secrets. You can use the environment variable ZENML_SECRET_VALIDATION_LEVEL to disable or control the degree to which ZenML validates your secrets:

• Setting it to NONE disables any validation.

• Setting it to SECRET_EXISTS only validates the existence of secrets. This might be useful if the machine you're running on only has permissions to list secrets but not actually read their values.

• Setting it to SECRET_AND_KEY_EXISTS (the default) validates both the secret existence as well as the existence of the exact key-value pair.