open-vault/website/source/intro/getting-started/first-secret.html.md

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
intro	Your First Secret	gettingstarted-firstsecret	With the Vault server running, let's read and write our first secret.

Your First Secret

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

One of the core features of Vault is the ability to read and write arbitrary secrets securely. On this page, we'll do this using the CLI, but there is also a complete HTTP API that can be used to programmatically do anything with Vault.

Secrets written to Vault are encrypted and then written to the backend storage. For our dev server, backend storage is in-memory, but in production this would more likely be on disk or in Consul. Vault encrypts the value before it is ever handed to the storage driver. The backend storage mechanism never sees the unencrypted value and doesn't have the means necessary to decrypt it without Vault.

Writing a Secret

Let's start by writing a secret. This is done very simply with the vault write command, as shown below:

$ vault write secret/hello value=world
Success! Data written to: secret/hello

This writes the pair value=world to the path secret/hello. We'll cover paths in more detail later, but for now it is important that the path is prefixed with secret/, otherwise this example won't work. The secret/ prefix is where arbitrary secrets can be read and written.

You can even write multiple pieces of data, if you want:

$ vault write secret/hello value=world excited=yes
Success! Data written to: secret/hello

vault write is a very powerful command. In addition to writing data directly from the command-line, it can read values and keypairs from stdin as well as files. For more information, see the vault write documentation.

~> Warning: The documentation uses the "key=value" based entry throughout, but it is more secure to use files if possible. Sending data via the CLI is often logged in shell history. For real secrets, please use files. See the link above for more information.

Reading a Secret

As you might expect, secrets can be read with vault read:

$ vault read secret/hello
Key       Value
excited   yes
value     world

As you can see, the values we wrote are given back to us. Vault read the data from storage and decrypted it. The output format is purposefully whitespace separated to make it easy to pipe into a tool like awk.

In addition to the tabular format, if you're working with machines or a tool like jq, you can output the data in JSON format:

$ vault read -format=json secret/hello
{
  "renewable": false,
  "lease_duration": 2592000,
  "data": {
    "excited": "yes",
    "value": "world"
  }
}

This contains some extra information, but you can see our data mirrored here as well. The JSON output is very useful for scripts. For example below we use the jq tool to extract the "excited" value:

$ vault read -format=json secret/hello | jq -r .data.excited
yes

Deleting a Secret

Now that we've learned how to read and write a secret, let's go ahead and delete it. We can do this with vault delete:

$ vault delete secret/hello
'secret/hello' successfully deleted.

Next

In this section we 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.

Next, we'll learn the basics about secret backends.