open-vault/website/source/docs/secrets/generic/index.html.md

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
docs	Generic Secret Backend	docs-secrets-generic	The generic secret backend can store arbitrary secrets.

Generic Secret Backend

Name: generic

The generic secret backend is used to store arbitrary secrets within the configured physical storage for Vault. If you followed along with the getting started guide, you interacted with a generic secret backend via the secret/ prefix that Vault mounts by default. You can mount as many of these backends at different mount points as you like.

Writing to a key in the generic backend will replace the old value; sub-fields are not merged together.

This backend honors the distinction between the create and update capabilities inside ACL policies.

Note: Path and key names are not obfuscated or encrypted; only the values set on keys are. You should not store sensitive information as part of a secret's path.

Quick Start

The generic backend allows for writing keys with arbitrary values. When data is returned, the lease_duration field (in the API JSON) or refresh_interval field (on the CLI) gives a hint as to how often a reader should look for a new value. This comes from the value of the default_lease_ttl set on the mount, or the system value.

There is one piece of special data handling: if a ttl key is provided, it will be treated as normal data, but on read the backend will attempt to parse it as a duration (either as a string like 1h or an integer number of seconds like 3600). If successful, the backend will use this value in place of the normal lease_duration. However, the given value will also still be returned exactly as specified, so you are free to use that key in any way that you like if it fits your input data.

As an example, we can write a new key "foo" to the generic backend mounted at "secret/" by default:

$ vault write secret/foo \
    zip=zap \
    ttl=1h
Success! Data written to: secret/foo

This writes the key with the "zip" field set to "zap" and a one hour TTL. We can test this by doing a read:

$ vault read secret/foo
Key               Value
---               -----
refresh_interval  3600
ttl               1h
zip               zap

As expected, we get the values previously set back as well as our custom TTL both as specified and translated to seconds. The duration has been set to 3600 seconds (one hour) as specified.

API

The Generic secret backend has a full HTTP API. Please see the Generic secret backend API for more details.