Your first secret
If you successfully completed the steps in Starting the Server, you started the dev server and exported the VAULT_TOKEN to the initial root token value so that vault login is not required to authenticate. If you have not yet completed those steps, 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 and write your first secret.
Key/Value secrets engine
When running Vault in dev mode, Key/Value v2 secrets engine is enabled at secret/ path. Key/Value secrets engine is a generic key-value store used to store 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 and doesn't have the means necessary to decrypt it without Vault.
Key/Value secrets engine has version 1 and 2. The difference is that v2 provides versioning of secrets and v1 does not.
Use the vault kv <subcommand> [options] [args] command to interact with K/V secrets engine.
Available subcommands:
delete
x
x
Delete versions of secrets stored in K/V
destroy
x
Permanently remove one or more versions of secrets
enable-versioning
x
Turns on versioning for an existing K/V v1 store
get
x
x
Retrieve data
list
x
x
List data or secrets
metadata
x
Interact with Vault's Key-Value storage
patch
x
Update secrets without overwriting existing secrets
put
x
x
Sets or update secrets (this replaces existing secrets)
rollback
x
Rolls back to a previous version of secrets
undelete
x
Restore the deleted version of secrets
To learn more about Key/Value v1 secrets engine, go through the Static Secrets: Key/Value Secrets Engine tutorial.
Get command help
You can interact with key/value secrets engine using the vault kv command. Get the 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 storeWrite a secret
Before you begin, check the command help.
$ vault kv put -helpThe help provides command examples along with optional parameters that you can use.
Now, write a key-value secret to the path hello , with a key of foo and value of world, using the 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 secrets and 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 2023-11-12T19:36:54.389113Z
custom_metadata <nil>
deletion_time n/a
destroyed false
version 1You will learn about paths in more detail later, but for now, it is important that the mount path to the KV v2 secrets engine is provided with -mount=secret, otherwise, this example won't work. The secret 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 2023-11-12T19:49:06.761365Z
custom_metadata <nil>
deletion_time n/a
destroyed false
version 2Notice that the version is now 2.
The examples in this tutorial use the <key>=<value> input to send secrets to Vault. However, sending data as a part of the CLI command often ends up in the shell history unencrypted. To avoid this, refer to the Static Secrets: Key/Value Secrets Engine tutorial to learn different approaches.
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 2023-11-12T01:40:09.888293Z
custom_metadata <nil>
deletion_time n/a
destroyed false
version 2
===== Data =====
Key Value
--- -----
excited yes
foo worldVault returns the latest version (in this case version 2) of the secrets at secret/hello.
To print only the value of a given field, use the -field=<key_name> flag.
$ vault kv get -mount=secret -field=excited hello
yesOptional JSON output is very useful for scripts. For example, you can use the jq tool to extract the value of the excited secret.
$ vault kv get -mount=secret -format=json hello | jq -r .data.data.excited
yesDelete a secret
Now that you've learned how to read and write a secret, let's go ahead and delete it. You can do so using the vault kv delete command.
$ vault kv delete -mount=secret hello
Success! Data deleted (if it existed) at: secret/data/helloTry to read the secret you just deleted.
$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello
== Secret Path ==
secret/data/hello
======= Metadata =======
Key Value
--- -----
created_time 2023-11-12T01:40:09.888293Z
custom_metadata <nil>
deletion_time 2023-11-12T01:40:41.786995Z
destroyed false
version 2The output only displays the metadata with deletion_time. It does not display the data itself once it is deleted. Notice that the destroyed parameter is false which means that you can recover the deleted data if the deletion was unintentional.
$ vault kv undelete -mount=secret -versions=2 hello
Success! Data written to: secret/undelete/helloNow, the data is recovered.
$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello
======= Metadata =======
Key Value
--- -----
created_time 2023-11-12T01:40:09.888293Z
custom_metadata <nil>
deletion_time n/a
destroyed false
version 2
===== Data =====
Key Value
--- -----
excited yes
foo worldNext
In this tutorial, you learned how to use the powerful CRUD features of Vault to store 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.
You may notice other tutorials on our site using the kv CLI commands with a different syntax ($ vault kv get secret/foo instead of the $ vault kv get -mount=secret foo that we've shown you here). Either style will have the same end result, but we recommend the more explicit -mount flag syntax when working with KV secrets engine v2, as it can avoid confusion later when you need to refer to the secret by its full path (secret/data/foo) when writing policies or raw API calls.
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