open-vault/website/source/docs/commands/read-write.html.md

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
docs	Reading and Writing Data	docs-commands-readwrite	The Vault CLI can be used to read, write, and delete secrets. This page documents how to do this.

Reading and Writing Data with the CLI

The Vault CLI can be used to read, write, and delete data from Vault. This data might be raw secrets, it might be configuration for a backend, etc. Whatever it is, the interface to read and write data to Vault is the same.

To determine what paths can be used to read and write data, please use the built-in help system to discover the paths.

Writing Data

To write data to Vault, you use vault write. It is very easy to use:

$ vault write secret/password \
    value=itsasecret
...

The above writes a value to secret/password. As mentioned in the getting started guide, multiple values can also be written:

$ vault write secret/password \
    value=itsasecret \
    username=something
...

For the secret/ backend, the key/value pairs are arbitrary and can be anything. For other backends, they're generally more strict, and the help system can tell you what data to send to Vault.

In addition to writing key/value pairs, Vault can write from a variety more sources.

stdin

vault write can read data to write from stdin by using "-" as the value. If you use "-" as the entire argument, then Vault expects to read a JSON object from stdin. The example below is equivalent to the first example above.

$ echo -n '{"value":"itsasecret"}' | vault write secret/password -
...

You can also add more values in addition to "-" on the command-line. Depending on their ordering will determine if they overwrite the values from stdin: if they're after the "-" (positionally on the command-line), then they will overwrite it, otherwise the values in stdin will overwrite the command line values.

In addition to reading full JSON objects, Vault can read just a JSON value. The example below is also identical to the previous example.

$ echo -n "itsasecret" | vault write secret/password value=-
...

Files

vault write can read data from files as well. The usage is very similar to stdin as documented above, but the syntax is @filename. Example:

$ cat data.json
{ "value": "itsasecret" }

$ vault write secret/password @data.json
...

And, just like stdin, you can also specify just values:

$ cat data.txt
itsasecret

$ vault write secret/password value=@data.txt

Unlike stdin, you can specify multiple files, repeat files, etc. all on the command line. Reading from files is very useful for complex data.

Reading Data

Data can be read using vault read. This command is very simple:

$ vault read secret/password
Key             	Value
---             	-----
refresh_interval	768h0m0s
value           	itsasecret

You can use the -format flag to get various different formats out from the command. Some formats are easier to use in different environments than others.

You can also use the -field flag to extract an individual field from the secret data.

$ vault read -field=value secret/password
itsasecret