Bouncer not reading API_KEY from environment correctly

crowdsec
1

According to the docs, I would expect the firewall bouncer to read values from the environment and expand the configuration with it. However, when I try this using the API_KEY variable, I receive a 403 from the LAPI.

My Config looks like this:

api_key: ${API_KEY}
api_url: ***********
deny_action: DROP
ipset_type: nethash
iptables_chains:
- crowdsec
log_mode: stdout
mode: iptables
update_frequency: 10s

When I put an env call into the start script of the bouncer, I can see the API_KEY variable is set to what I expect. If I put the value into the config directly, the bouncer works as expected.

Any advice on how to debug this would be appreciated.

2

The documentation you link too is the CrowdSec binary and that does support environment variables, however, bouncers do not we use ${API_KEY} as a placeholder within the post installation scripts to replace with the key it generates.

3

Ah, I see, thanks for clarifying

4

So, is it impossible to set the API key using an environment variable?

5

Depends on the remediation, but most of them do support variables now. The ones that dont are the lua based ones.

6

So, it should work for the firewall bouncer? It wasn’t working for me.