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

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
intro	Built-in Help	gettingstarted-help	Vault has a built-in help system to learn about the available paths in Vault and how to use them.

Built-in Help

You've now worked with vault write and vault read for multiple paths: generic secret backend with secret/ and dynamic AWS credentials with the AWS backend provider at aws/. In both cases, the usage of read/write and the paths to use differed. AWS in particular had special paths like aws/config.

Instead of having to memorize or reference documentation constantly to determine what paths to use, we built a help system directly into Vault. This help system can be accessed via the API or the command-line and generates human-readable help for any mounted backend.

On this page, we'll learn how to use this help system. It is an invaluable tool as you continue to work with Vault.

Backend Overview

For this, we'll assume you have the AWS backend mounted. If not, mount it with vault mount aws. Even if you don't have an AWS account, you can still mount the AWS backend.

With the backend mounted, let's learn about it with vault help:

$ vault help aws
## DESCRIPTION

The AWS backend dynamically generates AWS access keys for a set of
IAM policies. The AWS access keys have a configurable lease set and
are automatically revoked at the end of the lease.

After mounting this backend, credentials to generate IAM keys must
be configured with the "root" path and policies must be written using
the "roles/" endpoints before any access keys can be generated.

## PATHS

The following paths are supported by this backend. To view help for
any of the paths below, use the help command with any route matching
the path pattern. Note that depending on the policy of your auth token,
you may or may not be able to access certain paths.

    ^config/lease$
        Configure the default lease information for generated credentials.

    ^config/root$
        Configure the root credentials that are used to manage IAM.

    ^creds/(?P<name>\w+)$
        Generate an access key pair for a specific role.

    ^roles/(?P<name>\w+)$
        Read and write IAM policies that access keys can be made for.

The vault help command takes a path. By specifying the root path for a mount, it will give us the overview of that mount. Notice how the help not only contains a description, but also the exact regular expressions used to match routes for this backend along with a brief description of what the route is for.

Path Help

After seeing the overview, we can continue to dive deeper by getting help for an individual path. For this, just use vault help with a path that would match the regular expression for that path. Note that the path doesn't need to actually work. For example, we'll get the help below for accessing aws/creds/operator, even though we never created the operator role:

$ vault help aws/creds/operator
Request:        creds/operator
Matching Route: ^creds/(?P<name>\w+)$

Generate an access key pair for a specific role.

## PARAMETERS

    name (string)
        Name of the role

## DESCRIPTION

This path will generate a new, never before used key pair for
accessing AWS. The IAM policy used to back this key pair will be
the "name" parameter. For example, if this backend is mounted at "aws",
then "aws/creds/deploy" would generate access keys for the "deploy" role.

The access keys will have a lease associated with them. The access keys
can be revoked by using the lease ID.

Within a path, we're given the parameters that this path requires. Some parameters come from the route itself. In this case, the "name" parameter is a named capture from the route regular expression.

There is also a description of what that path does.

Go ahead and explore more paths! Mount other backends, traverse their help systems and learn about what they do. For example, learn about the generic secret/ path.

Next

The help system may not be the most exciting feature of Vault, but it is indispensable in day-to-day usage of Vault. The help system lets you learn about how to use any backend within Vault without leaving the command line.

Next, we'll learn about authentication.