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| 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 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 key pairs 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 about reading in from STDIN for more information.
Reading a Secret
As you might expect, secrets can be read with vault read:
$ vault read secret/hello
Key Value
--- -----
refresh_interval 768h0m0s
excited yes
value world
As you can see, the values we wrote are given back to us. Vault reads the data from storage and decrypts 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
{
"request_id": "68315073-6658-e3ff-2da7-67939fb91bbd",
"lease_id": "",
"lease_duration": 2764800,
"renewable": false,
"data": {
"excited": "yes",
"value": "world"
},
"warnings": null
}
This contains some extra information; many backends create leases for secrets
that allow time-limited access to other systems, and in those cases lease_id would
contain a lease identifier and lease_duration would contain the length of time
for which the lease is valid, in seconds.
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 value of the excited secret:
$ 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
Success! Deleted 'secret/hello' if it existed.
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.