Vault

• Website: https://www.vaultproject.io
• IRC: #vault-tool on Freenode
• Mailing list: Google Groups

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

A modern system requires access to a multitude of secrets: database credentials, API keys for external services, credentials for service-oriented architecture communication, etc. Understanding who is accessing what secrets is already very difficult and platform-specific. Adding on key rolling, secure storage, and detailed audit logs is almost impossible without a custom solution. This is where Vault steps in.

The key features of Vault are:

• Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.

• Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.

• Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.

• Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.

• Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.

For more information, see the introduction section of the Vault website.

Getting Started & Documentation

All documentation is available on the Vault website.

Developing Vault

If you wish to work on Vault itself or any of its built-in systems, you'll first need Go installed on your machine (version 1.4+ is required).

For local dev first make sure Go is properly installed, including setting up a GOPATH. After setting up Go, install Godeps, a tool we use for vendoring dependencies and Gox, a simple cross compilation tool:

$ go get github.com/tools/godep
$ go get github.com/mitchellh/gox
...

Next, clone this repository into $GOPATH/src/github.com/hashicorp/vault. Then type make. This will run the tests. If this exits with exit status 0, then everything is working!

$ make
...

To compile a development version of Vault, run make dev. This will put the Vault binary in the bin and $GOPATH/bin folders:

$ make dev
...
$ bin/vault
...

If you're developing a specific package, you can run tests for just that package by specifying the TEST variable. For example below, only vault package tests will be run.

$ make test TEST=./vault
...

Acceptance Tests

Vault has comprehensive acceptance tests covering most of the features of the secret and auth backends.

If you're working on a feature of a secret or auth backend and want to verify it is functioning (and also hasn't broken anything else), we recommend running the acceptance tests.

Warning: The acceptance tests create/destroy/modify real resources, which may incur real costs in some cases. In the presence of a bug, it is technically possible that broken backends could leave dangling data behind. Therefore, please run the acceptance tests at your own risk. At the very least, we recommend running them in their own private account for whatever backend you're testing.

To run the acceptance tests, invoke make testacc:

$ make testacc TEST=./builtin/logical/consul
...

The TEST variable is required, and you should specify the folder where the backend is. The TESTARGS variable is recommended to filter down to a specific resource to test, since testing all of them at once can sometimes take a very long time.

Acceptance tests typically require other environment variables to be set for things such as access keys. The test itself should error early and tell you what to set, so it is not documented here.