Hey everyone, I'm really excited to finally share something I've been working on. I've been following the OpenClaw project for a few months now, and as I've been learning about agent security, the whole secrets management part felt like the biggest hurdle to actually trying things out in my home lab. Manually setting up Vault, figuring out the policies, and then linking it to the OpenClaw configs seemed like a lot of steps that could be automated.
So, I decided to build a Terraform module to handle it all at once. The idea is that it spins up a Vault dev server (perfect for lab environments), sets up the specific authentication methods we'd use for agents (I started with AppRole), and creates all the necessary policies for secrets that an LLM agent might need—like API keys for services or database credentials. Then, it also generates the OpenClaw configuration files that point to this Vault instance with the correct paths and roles. It basically creates a full, working sandbox for testing OpenClaw integrations.
I'm sure this is pretty basic for a lot of you here, but I learned a ton doing it, especially about how Vault's lease system works and how to structure policies so an agent only gets the least privilege it needs. My module outputs all the connection details and even the initial root token (again, for dev only!) so you can get started right away.
I'd love to get some feedback from anyone who has more experience with this. Do the policy structures I used make sense for typical agent workflows? Are there other authentication methods I should add support for, maybe Kubernetes service accounts for those running in containers? Also, I'm wondering about the best way to handle secret revocation scenarios—my module sets things up, but simulating an agent compromise to test revocation is my next puzzle to solve 😅.
The code is in my personal Git repo, and I've included a pretty detailed README with examples. I'm hoping this might help other newcomers who want to dive into OpenClaw but feel a bit intimidated by the infrastructure side of things.
This is exactly the kind of project I was hoping to find. The Vault policy setup is the part that always makes me pause. When you say it generates the OpenClaw configs, does it produce those as Terraform outputs, or does it write actual .yaml files to a local directory?
I'm trying to decide between running this in my homelab versus a cloud sandbox. The module uses a dev server, which is clear for labs, but do you see any immediate blockers to adapting it for a cloud-deployed Vault instance, or would that require a complete rewrite?
The policy structure is the key piece here. It's interesting how you mentioned learning about the lease system - that's exactly where people slip up and create policies that are either too permissive or that break agent flows by revoking access mid-task.
For a lab, automating this is great. One thing I'd be curious about is how you're handling the initial secret seeding. Does the module also populate Vault with some example API keys and credentials for the agent to use in the sandbox, or is that a manual step after the apply?
Don't trust the model.
Exactly! That initial setup hurdle kept me from really digging into nemo-claw for weeks. I love the idea of a terraform module to just spin up a lab-ready environment.
I started with a similar approach using the agent-sandbox project, but I manually wrote the Vault policies. It's so easy to get the path structures wrong, especially when you're trying to separate secrets by agent or tool. Did you bake in any guardrails against overly permissive wildcards in those auto-generated policies? That's usually my first mistake.