Your first secret | Vault | HashiCorp Developer (2024)

If you successfully completed the steps in Starting theServer, you started the dev serverand exported the VAULT_TOKEN to the initial root token value so that vaultlogin is not required to authenticate. If you have not yet completed thosesteps, please review that tutorial and do so before proceeding here.

Now that the dev server is up and running, let's get straight to it and read andwrite your first secret.

When running Vault in dev mode, Key/Value v2 secretsengine is enabled atsecret/ path. Key/Value secrets engine is a generic key-value store used tostore arbitrary secrets within the configured physical storage for Vault.Secrets written to Vault are encrypted and then written to backend storage.Therefore, the backend storage mechanism never sees the unencrypted value anddoesn't have the means necessary to decrypt it without Vault.

Key/Value secrets engine has version 1 and 2. The difference is that v2provides versioning of secrets and v1 does not.

Use the vault kv <subcommand> [options][args] command to interact withK/V secrets engine.

Available subcommands:

Get command help

You can interact with key/value secrets engine using the vault kv command. Getthe command help.

$ vault kv -help Usage: vault kv <subcommand> [options] [args] This command has subcommands for interacting with Vault's key-value store. Here are some simple examples, and more detailed examples are available in the subcommands or the documentation. Create or update the key named "foo" in the "secret" mount with the value "bar=baz": $ vault kv put -mount=secret foo bar=baz Read this value back: $ vault kv get -mount=secret foo Get metadata for the key: $ vault kv metadata get -mount=secret foo Get a specific version of the key: $ vault kv get -mount=secret -version=1 foo The deprecated path-like syntax can also be used, but this should be avoided for KV v2, as the fact that it is not actually the full API path to the secret (secret/data/foo) can cause confusion: $ vault kv get secret/foo Please see the individual subcommand help for detailed usage information.Subcommands: delete Deletes versions in the KV store destroy Permanently removes one or more versions in the KV store enable-versioning Turns on versioning for a KV store get Retrieves data from the KV store list List data or secrets metadata Interact with Vault's Key-Value storage patch Sets or updates data in the KV store without overwriting put Sets or updates data in the KV store rollback Rolls back to a previous version of data undelete Undeletes versions in the KV store

Before you begin, check the command help.

$ vault kv put -help

The help provides command examples along with optional parameters that you canuse.

Now, write a key-value secret to the path hello , with a key of foo and value of world, usingthe vault kv put command against the mount path secret, which is where the KV v2 secrets engine is mounted. This command creates a new version of the secretsand replaces any pre-existing data at the path if any.

$ vault kv put -mount=secret hello foo=world== Secret Path ==secret/data/hello======= Metadata =======Key Value--- -----created_time 2022-06-15T19:36:54.389113Zcustom_metadata <nil>deletion_time n/adestroyed falseversion 1

You will learn about paths in more detail later, but for now it is important that themount path to the KV v2 secrets engine is provided with -mount=secret, otherwise this example won't work. Thesecret mount path (which was automatically set up for you when you started your Vault server in -dev mode) is where arbitrary secrets can be read and written.

A flag provided but not defined: -mount error means you are using an older version of Vault from before this syntax was introduced.Upgrade to at least Vault 1.11, or use the old syntax (secret/hello instead of -mount=secret hello) for any commands in this guide.

With kv put you can even write multiple pieces of data.

$ vault kv put -mount=secret hello foo=world excited=yes== Secret Path ==secret/data/hello======= Metadata =======Key Value--- -----created_time 2022-06-15T19:49:06.761365Zcustom_metadata <nil>deletion_time n/adestroyed falseversion 2

Notice that the version is now 2.

Read a secret

As you might expect, secrets can be retrieved with vault kv get.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello== Secret Path ==secret/data/hello======= Metadata =======Key Value--- -----created_time 2022-01-15T01:40:09.888293Zcustom_metadata <nil>deletion_time n/adestroyed falseversion 2===== Data =====Key Value--- -----excited yesfoo world

Vault returns the latest version (in this case version 2) of the secrets atsecret/hello.

To print only the value of a given field, use the -field=<key_name> flag.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret -field=excited helloyes

Optional JSON output is very useful for scripts. For example, you can use thejq tool to extract the value of the excited secret.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret -format=json hello | jq -r .data.data.excitedyes

Now that you've learned how to read and write a secret, let's go aheadand delete it. You can do so using the vault kv delete command.

$ vault kv delete -mount=secret helloSuccess! Data deleted (if it existed) at: secret/data/hello

Try to read the secret you just deleted.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello== Secret Path ==secret/data/hello======= Metadata =======Key Value--- -----created_time 2022-01-15T01:40:09.888293Zcustom_metadata <nil>deletion_time 2022-01-15T01:40:41.786995Zdestroyed falseversion 2

The output only displays the metadata with deletion_time. It does not displaythe data itself once it is deleted. Notice that the destroyed parameter isfalse which means that you can recover the deleted data if the deletion wasunintentional.

$ vault kv undelete -mount=secret -versions=2 helloSuccess! Data written to: secret/undelete/hello

Now, the data is recovered.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello======= Metadata =======Key Value--- -----created_time 2022-01-15T01:40:09.888293Zcustom_metadata <nil>deletion_time n/adestroyed falseversion 2===== Data =====Key Value--- -----excited yesfoo world

Next

In this tutorial, you learned how to use the powerful CRUD features of Vault tostore arbitrary secrets. On its own, this is already a useful but basic feature.Key/Value secrets engine is one of the secrets engines that Vault offers.

Continue to the SecretsEngine tutorial for a quicktour of Vault secrets engines.

You may notice other tutorials on our site using the kv CLI commands witha different syntax ($ vault kv get secret/foo instead of the$ vault kv get -mount=secret foo that we've shown you here). Either stylewill have the same end result, but we recommend the more explicit -mount flagsyntax when working with KV secrets engine v2, as it can avoid confusion laterwhen you need to refer to the secret by its full path (secret/data/foo) whenwriting policies or raw API calls.

Help and reference

This tutorial only touched the basis of the Key/Value secrets engine. To learnmore about the features of Key/Value secrets engines, go through the followingtutorials:

• Versioned Key/Value Secrets Engine
• Static Secrets: Key/Value Secrets Engine