106 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
106 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
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---
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layout: "docs"
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page_title: "Help"
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sidebar_current: "docs-commands-help"
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description: |-
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The Vault CLI has a built-in help system that can be used to get help for not only the CLI itself, but also any paths that the CLI can be used with within Vault.
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---
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# Help
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In addition to standard CLI help using the `-h` or `-help` flag for
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commands, Vault has a built-in `help` command that can be used to get
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help for specific paths within Vault. These paths are used with the
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API or `read, write, delete` commands in order to interact with Vault.
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The help system is the easiest way to learn how to use the various systems
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in Vault, and also allows you to discover new paths.
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-> **Important!** The help system is incredibly important in day-to-day
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use of Vault. As a beginner or experienced user of Vault, you'll be using
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the help command a lot to remember how to use different components of
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Vault.
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## Discovering Paths
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Before using `help`, it is important to understand "paths" within Vault.
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Paths are the parameters used for `vault read`, `vault write`, etc. An
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example path is `secret/foo`, or `aws/config/root`. The paths available
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depend on the mounted secret backends. Because of this, the interactive
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help is an indispensible tool to finding what paths are supported.
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To discover what paths are supported, use `vault help <mount point>`.
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For example, if you mounted the AWS secret backend, you can use
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`vault help aws` to find the paths supported by that backend. The paths
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will be shown with regular expressions, which can make them hard to
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parse, but they're also extremely exact.
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You can try it right away with any Vault with `vault help secret`, since
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`secret` is always mounted initially. The output from this command is shown
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below and contains both a description of what that backend is for, along with
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the paths it supports.
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```
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$ vault help secret
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## DESCRIPTION
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The generic backend reads and writes arbitrary secrets to the backend.
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The secrets are encrypted/decrypted by Vault: they are never stored
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unencrypted in the backend and the backend never has an opportunity to
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see the unencrypted value.
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Leases can be set on a per-secret basis. These leases will be sent down
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when that secret is read, and it is assumed that some outside process will
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revoke and/or replace the secret at that path.
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## PATHS
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The following paths are supported by this backend. To view help for
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any of the paths below, use the help command with any route matching
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the path pattern. Note that depending on the policy of your auth token,
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you may or may not be able to access certain paths.
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^.*$
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Pass-through secret storage to the physical backend, allowing you to
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read/write arbitrary data into secret storage.
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```
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## Single Path
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Once you've found a path you like, you can learn more about it by
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using `vault help <path>` where "path" is a path that matches one of the
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regular expressions from the backend help.
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Or, if you saw an example online with `vault write` or some similar
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command, you can plug that directly into `vault help` to learn about it
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(assuming you have the proper backends mounted!).
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For example, below we get the help for a single secret in the `secret/`
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mount point. The help shows the operations that that path supports, the
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parameters it takes (for write), and a description of that specific path.
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```
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$ vault help secret/password
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Request: password
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Matching Route: ^.*$
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Pass-through secret storage to the physical backend, allowing you to
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read/write arbitrary data into secret storage.
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## PARAMETERS
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lease (string)
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Lease time for this key when read. Ex: 1h
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## DESCRIPTION
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The pass-through backend reads and writes arbitrary data into secret storage,
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encrypting it along the way.
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A lease can be specified when writing with the "lease" field. If given, then
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when the secret is read, Vault will report a lease with that duration. It
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is expected that the consumer of this backend properly writes renewed keys
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before the lease is up. In addition, revocation must be handled by the
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user of this backend.
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```
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