path-help

The path-help command retrieves API help for paths. All endpoints in Vault provide built-in help in markdown format. This includes system paths, secret engines, and auth methods.

The help system is the easiest way to learn how to use the various systems in Vault, and also allows you to discover new paths.

Before using path-help, it is important to understand "paths" within Vault. Paths are the parameters used for vault read, vault write, etc. An example path is secret/foo, or aws/config/root. The paths available depend on the secrets engines in use. Because of this, the interactive help is an indispensable tool to finding what paths are supported.

To discover what paths are supported, use vault path-help PATH. For example, if you enabled the AWS secrets engine, you can use vault path-help aws to find the paths supported by that backend. The paths are shown with regular expressions, which can make them hard to parse, but they are also extremely exact.

Examples

Get help output for the KV secrets engine:

$ vault path-help secret

Description

The KV backend reads and writes arbitrary secrets to the backend. The secrets are encrypted/decrypted by Vault: they are never stored unencrypted in the backend and the backend never has an opportunity to see the unencrypted value.

Leases can be set on a per-secret basis. These leases will be sent down when that secret is read, and it is assumed that some outside process will revoke and/or replace the secret at that path.

Paths

The following paths are supported by this backend. To view help for any of the paths below, use the help command with any route matching the path pattern. Note that depending on the policy of your auth token, you may or may not be able to access certain paths.

^.*$
    Pass-through secret storage to the storage backend, allowing you to
    read/write arbitrary data into secret storage.

Once you've found a path you like, you can learn more about it by using vault path-help <path> where "path" is a path that matches one of the regular expressions from the backend help.

$ vault path-help secret/password
Request:        password
Matching Route: ^.*$

Pass-through secret storage to the storage backend, allowing you to read/write arbitrary data into secret storage.

Parameters

lease (string)
    Lease time for this key when read. Ex: 1h

Description

The pass-through backend reads and writes arbitrary data into secret storage, encrypting it along the way.

A lease can be specified when writing with the "lease" field. If given, then when the secret is read, Vault will report a lease with that duration. It is expected that the consumer of this backend properly writes renewed keys before the lease is up. In addition, revocation must be handled by the user of this backend.

Usage

There are no flags beyond the standard set of flags included on all commands.