What are generated resources? When you run boundary dev or boundary database init, Boundary automatically
generates a number of resources to make getting started easier. Default scopes, auth methods, user, account, and
targets are just some of the resources Boundary will generate unless you tell it not to.
In a production or long-running environment, these resources are not necessary, but without them, managing
Boundary from scratch isn't straight forward. How do you create your first user and login to administer a Boundary
deployment that has no authentication methods, users, accounts, etc.? This section describes how to get your freshly
deployed Boundary installation off the ground for non-dev environments.
Initializing Boundary without generated resources starts with your Boundary configuration file. Specifically,
the controller configuration specifies three KMS blocks:
In this example, we're using hardcoded AEAD keys, but in a real world non-dev deployment, you
should use your cloud provider's KMS such as AWS KMS to manage the keys Boundary
uses to encrypt sensitive information.
The KMS block we're focused on is the recovery block. This block specifies the key used to "recover" Boundary
but you can also use it to authenticate to Boundary and manage it as a "global" super user. This allows
you to authenticate from the CLI or from Terraform in order to manage Boundary without any generated
resources.
To authenticate to Boundary using the recovery KMS workflow:
To use the recovery workflow on the CLI, you must pass the -recovery-config <path_to_kms_recovery_config> flag or set the environment
variable for BOUNDARY_RECOVERY_CONFIG for every command ran. Authentication takes place for every command
ran when using the recovery workflow, there is no boundary authenticate step:
When you start Boundary, you will effectively have a blank sheet to work against. The initial migrations in the database have been run (note that this includes creating special users like u_anon and the global scope) and the internal keyrings have been initialized. From here, it's required that
you use the KMS recovery workflow described above to create at a minimum an auth method, a user, an account, and a
role with sufficient grants. Otherwise, you need to continue to use the recovery workflow for management. It's important
to realize that this is effectively a global super user type of workflow and comes with security concerns.
This section covers how to configure your first auth method, user, account, and role to login to Boundary without
the recovery KMS workflow. In this example, we're going to make an admin user for the global and project level
scopes we create. This will allow our user to configure targets within those scopes and manage them.
In this example, we're going to create an org and project scope and skip creating an administrator and admin role
for each scope. We're going to specify a role for managing these scopes by selected users in a later step.
Create a user and associate the user with the login account created in the previous step.
This user will also be the principal in the role we create in the following step.
The following describes the four baseline roles you'll need to create to manage resources within the org and project
scopes created above. These roles are similar to the roles created for you if generation had not been skipped during boundary database init when executed with the -skip-initial-login-role-creation flag, Declaring roles explicitly
allows you to manage them independently and fully within Terraform or via the CLI. In doing so, you can precisely define their access.
The following example creates 4 roles:
To allow anonymous (unauthenticated) users the ability to list scopes and auth methods in the global scope.
To allow anonymous (unauthenticated) users the ability to list scopes and auth methods in the organization scope.
To allow myuser user administration grants at the org scope.
To allow myuser user administration grants at the project scope.
