Peep

Historically, deploying Python projects has been a pain in the neck for the security-conscious. First, PyPI lets authors change the contents of their packages without revving their version numbers. Second, any future compromise of PyPI or its caching CDN means you could get a package that's different from the one you signed up for. If you wanted to guarantee known-good dependencies for your deployment, you had to either run a local PyPI mirror--manually uploading packages as you vetted them--or else check everything into a vendor library, necessitating a lot of fooling around with your VCS (or maintaining custom tooling) to do upgrades.

Peep fixes all that.

Vet your packages, put hashes of the PyPI-sourced tarballs into requirements.txt, use peep install instead of pip install, and let the crypto do the rest. If a downloaded package doesn't match the hash, peep will freak out, and installation will go no further. No servers to maintain, no enormous vendor libs to wrestle. Just requirements.txt with some funny-looking comments and peace of mind.

Switching to Peep

0. Install peep:

   pip install peep
   

1. Use peep to install your project once:

   cd yourproject
   peep install -r requirements.txt
   

   You'll get output like this:

   <a bunch of pip output>
   
   The following packages had no hashes specified in the requirements file,
   which leaves them open to tampering. Vet these packages to your
   satisfaction, then add these "sha256" lines like so:
   
   # sha256: L9XU_-gfdi3So-WEctaQoNu6N2Z3ZQYAOu4-16qor-8
   Flask==0.9
   
   # sha256: YhddA1kUpMLVODNbhIgHfQn88vioPHLwayTyqwOJEgY
   futures==2.1.3
   
   # sha256: qF4YU3XbdcEJ-Z7N49VUFfA15waKgiUs9PFsZnrDj0k
   Jinja2==2.6
   
   # sha256: u_8C3DCeUoRt2WPSlIOnKV_MAhYkc40zNZxDlxCA-as
   Pygments==1.4
   
   -------------------------------
   Not proceeding to installation.
   

2. Vet the packages coming off PyPI in whatever way you typically do.

3. Add the recommended hash lines to your requirements.txt, each one directly above the requirement it applies to. (The hashes are of the original, compressed tarballs from PyPI.)

4. In the future, always use peep install to install your requirements. You are now cryptographically safe!

The Fearsome Warning

If, during installation, a hash doesn't match, peep will say something like this:

THE FOLLOWING PACKAGES DIDN'T MATCHES THE HASHES SPECIFIED IN THE
REQUIREMENTS FILE. If you have updated the package versions, update the
hashes. If not, freak out, because someone has tampered with the packages.

    requests: expected FWvz7Ce6nsfgz4--AoCHGAmdIY3kA-tkpxTXO6GimrE
                   got YhddA1kUpMLVODNbhIgHfQn88vioPHLwayTyqwOJEgY

It will then exit with a status of 1. Freak out appropriately.

Other Niceties

• peep implicitly turns on pip's --no-deps option so unverified dependencies of your requirements can't sneak through.

• All non-install commands just fall through to pip, so you can use peep all the time if you want. This comes in handy for existing scripts that have a big $PIP=/path/to/pip at the top.

• peep-compatible requirements files remain entirely usable with pip, because the hashes are just comments, after all.

• Have a manually downloaded package you've vetted? Run peep hash on its tarball (the original, from PyPI--be sure to keep it around) to get its hash line:

  % peep hash nose-1.3.0.tar.gz
  # sha256: TmPMMyXedc-Y_61AvnL6aXU96CRpUXMXj3TANP5PUmA
  

• If a package is already present--which might be the case if you're installing into a non-empty virtualenv--peep doesn't bother downloading or building it again. It assumes you installed it with peep in a previous invocation and thus trusts it. Re-using a virtualenv during deployment can really speed things up, but it does leave open the question of how to remove dependencies which are no longer needed.

Embedding

Peep was designed for unsupervised continuous deployment scenarios. In such scenarios, manual ahead-of-time prepartion on the deployment machine is a liability: one more thing to go wrong. To relieve you of having to install (and upgrade) peep by hand on your server or build box, we've made peep embeddable. You can copy the peep.py file directly into your project's source tree and call it from there in your deployment script. This also gives you an obvious starting point for your chain of trust: however you trust your source code is how you trust your copy of peep, and peep verifies everything else via hashes. (Equivalent would be if your OS provided peep as a package--presumably you trust your OS packages already--but this is not yet common.)

Troubleshooting

Are you suddenly getting the Fearsome Warning? Maybe you're really in trouble, but maybe something more innocuous is happening.

A few packages offer downloads in multiple formats: for example, zips and tarballs. PyPI used to be unpredictable as to which it offered first, and pip simply takes the first one offered. Thus, if you're running an old version of PyPI internally or have some other Cheeseshop implementation which lacks a stable sort order, some packages may effectively have more than one valid hash for a given version. To allow for these, you can stack up multiple known-good hashes above a requirement, as long as they are within a contiguous block of commented lines:

# Tarball:
# sha256: lvpN706AIAvoJ8P1EUfdez-ohzuSB-MyXUe6Rb8ppcE
#
# And the zip file:
# sha256: 6QTt-5DahBKcBiUs06BfkLTuvBu1uF7pblb_bPaUONU
mock==0.8.0

If you don't want to wait until you're bitten by this surprise, use the peep hash command to find hashes of each equivalent archive for a package. I like to vet one of them (say, the tarball), then download the other and use a file comparison tool to verify that they have identical contents. Then I run peep hash over both original archives, like so, and add the result to my requirements.txt:

% peep hash mock-0.8.0.tar.gz mock-0.8.0.zip
# sha256: lvpN706AIAvoJ8P1EUfdez-ohzuSB-MyXUe6Rb8ppcE
# sha256: 6QTt-5DahBKcBiUs06BfkLTuvBu1uF7pblb_bPaUONU

Version History

0.9

• Put the operative parts of peep into a single module rather than a package, and make it directly executable. (Brian Warner)

0.8

• Support installing into non-empty virtualenvs, for speed. We do this by trusting any already-installed package which satisfies a requirement. This means you no longer have to rebuild lxml, for instance, each time you deploy.
• Wrap text output to 80 columns for nicer word wrap.

0.7

Make some practical tweaks for projects which bootstrap their trust chains by checking a tarball of peep into their source trees.

• Start supporting versions of pip back to 0.6.2 (released in January 2010). This way, you can deploy trustworthily on old versions of RHEL just by checking a tarball of peep into your source tree and pip-installing it; you don't have to check in pip itself or go to the bother of unpacking the peep tarball and running python setup.py install from your deploy script.
• Remove the explicit dependency on pip. This is so a blithe call to pip install peep.tar.gz without --no-deps doesn't go out and pull an untrusted package from PyPI. Instead, we scream at runtime if pip is absent or too old. Fail safe.

0.6

• Add peep hash subcommand.
• Require pip>=1.2, as lower versions have a bug that causes a crash on peep install.

0.5

• Allow multiple acceptable hashes for a package. This works around PyPI's non-stable handling of packages like mock, which provide equivalent zips and tarballs: https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pypi/issue/64/order-of-archives-on-index-page-is-not.

0.4

• Rework how peep downloads files and determines versions so we can tolerate PEP-386-noncompliant package version numbers. This amounted to a minor rewrite.
• Remove indentation from hash output so you don't have to dedent it after pasting it into requirements.txt.

0.3

• Support Windows and other non-Unix OSes.
• The hash output now includes the actual version numbers of packages, so you can just paste it straight into your requirements.txt.

0.2.1

• Add a shebang line so you can actually run peep after doing pip install peep. Sorry, folks, I was doing setup.py develop on my own box.

0.2

• Fix repeated-logging bug.
• Fix spurious error message about not having any requirements files.
• Pass pip's exit code through to the outside for calls to non-install subcommands.
• Improve spacing in the final output.

0.1

• Proof of concept. Does all the crypto stuff. Should be secure. Some rough edges in the UI.