Bitwarden plugin

This DMNO plugin allows you to securely access your secrets stored in Bitwarden Secrets Manager. Please note that this plugin is not compatible with Bitwarden’s Password Manager product. Authentication with Bitwarden uses Machine Account Access Tokens.

Installation & setup

Install the package in the service(s) that will use secrets from Bitwarden.

npm

npm add @dmno/bitwarden-plugin

pnpm

pnpm add @dmno/bitwarden-plugin

Yarn

yarn add @dmno/bitwarden-plugin

Bun

bun add @dmno/bitwarden-plugin

---

After installation, you’ll need to initialize the plugin in your config.mts and add a config item to hold your machine account access token. You can explicitly wire the plugin up to the service account token if using multiple tokens at once, or it will be injected by default based on the BitwardenSecretsManagerTypes.machineAccountAccessToken type. It’s ok if you have not created the machine account or access token - we’ll do that in the next section.

.dmno/config.mts

import { BitwardenSecretsManagerDmnoPlugin, BitwardenSecretsManagerTypes } from '@dmno/bitwarden-plugin';

// by default, access token will be injected using types
const bitwardenPlugin = new BitwardenSecretsManagerDmnoPlugin('bitwarden');

// or you can explicitly wire it up by path
const bitwardenPlugin2 = new BitwardenSecretsManagerDmnoPlugin('bitwarden', {
  accessToken: configPath('..', 'BWS_TOKEN')
});

export default defineDmnoService({
  schema: {
    BWS_TOKEN: {
      extends: BitwardenSecretsManagerTypes.machineAccountAccessToken,
      // NOTE - the type itself is already marked as sensitive 🔐
    },
  },
});

Plugin instance IDs

You must give each plugin instance a unique id so we can refer to it in other services and the dmno CLI.

In this case we used bitwarden, but you can imagine splitting vaults and access, and having multiple plugin instances - for example bitwarden/prod for highly sensitive production secrets and bitwarden/dev for everything else.

---

Setup Project & Secrets

If you are already using Bitwarden Secrets Manager, you likely already have existing projects that contain secrets. If so, now would be a good time to review how they are all organized. If not, you should create at least one project, as each secret can have a parent project it belongs to, and access can be granted to projects rather than managing each secret individually.

Use projects to segment access

You should use multiple projects to segment your secrets following the Principle of Least Privilege. See more in our Secret segmentation guide.

Machine account access tokens now serve as your secret-zero - which grants access to the rest of your sensitive config stored in Bitwarden. It must be set locally and in deployed environments, but it is sensitive so we must pass in the value as an override rather than storing it within the config. Locally, this usually means storing it in your .env.local file and on a deployed environment you’ll usually set it wherever you would normally pass in environment variables. DMNO will handle the rest. See Setting overrides for more details.

---

Add items to your schema

With the plugin initialized and access wired up, now we must update our config schema to connect specific config values to data stored in Bitwarden secrets.

Items are wired up using the secret UUIDs found in the Bitwarden UI. For example:

export default defineDmnoService({
  schema: {
    ITEM_WITH_ID: {
      value: bitwardenPlugin.secretById('abc123-secretuuid-xyz789'),
    },
    // example showing a switchBy and multiple plugin instances
    SWITCHED_ITEM: {
      value: switchBy('MY_ENV_FLAG', {
        _default: 'not-sensitive',
        staging: bitwardenDevSecrets.secretById('0123...'),
        production: bitwardenProdSecrets.secretById('789...'),
      }),
    },
  },
});

Self-hosted

In case you are self-hosting Bitwarden Secrets Manager, the BitwardenSecretsManagerDmnoPlugin also takes additional inputs for apiServerUrl and identityServerUrl. The values for this can be found in the Bitwarden UI under Machine Accounts > Config. See the Bitwarden docs for more details.

const bitwardenPlugin = new BitwardenSecretsManagerDmnoPlugin('bitwarden', {
  apiServerUrl: 'https://vault.bitwarden.com/api', // default value
  identityServerUrl: 'https://vault.bitwarden.com/identity', // default value
});