Your first secret

8min
|
Vault
Video
Interactive

If you successfully completed the steps in Starting the Server, you started the dev server and exported the VAULT_TOKEN to the initial root token value so that vault login is not required to authenticate. If you have not yet completed those steps, please review that tutorial and do so before proceeding here.

Now that the dev server is up and running, let's get straight to it and read and write your first secret.

Launch Terminal

This tutorial includes a free interactive command-line lab that lets you follow along on actual cloud infrastructure.

Key/Value secrets engine

When running Vault in dev mode, Key/Value v2 secrets engine is enabled at secret/ path. Key/Value secrets engine is a generic key-value store used to store arbitrary secrets within the configured physical storage for Vault. Secrets written to Vault are encrypted and then written to backend storage. Therefore, the backend storage mechanism never sees the unencrypted value and doesn't have the means necessary to decrypt it without Vault.

Key/Value secrets engine has version 1 and 2. The difference is that v2 provides versioning of secrets and v1 does not.

Use the vault kv <subcommand> [options] [args] command to interact with K/V secrets engine.

Available subcommands:

Subcommand	kv v1	kv v2	Description
delete	x	x	Delete versions of secrets stored in K/V
destroy		x	Permanently remove one or more versions of secrets
enable-versioning		x	Turns on versioning for an existing K/V v1 store
get	x	x	Retrieve data
list	x	x	List data or secrets
metadata		x	Interact with Vault's Key-Value storage
patch		x	Update secrets without overwriting existing secrets
put	x	x	Sets or update secrets (this replaces existing secrets)
rollback		x	Rolls back to a previous version of secrets
undelete		x	Restore the deleted version of secrets

To learn more about Key/Value v1 secrets engine, go through the Static Secrets: Key/Value Secrets Engine tutorial.

Get command help

You can interact with key/value secrets engine using the vault kv command. Get the command help.

$ vault kv -help 

Usage: vault kv <subcommand> [options] [args]

  This command has subcommands for interacting with Vault's key-value
  store. Here are some simple examples, and more detailed examples are
  available in the subcommands or the documentation.

  Create or update the key named "foo" in the "secret" mount with the value
  "bar=baz":

      $ vault kv put -mount=secret foo bar=baz

  Read this value back:

      $ vault kv get -mount=secret foo

  Get metadata for the key:

      $ vault kv metadata get -mount=secret foo

  Get a specific version of the key:

      $ vault kv get -mount=secret -version=1 foo

  The deprecated path-like syntax can also be used, but this should be avoided
  for KV v2, as the fact that it is not actually the full API path to
  the secret (secret/data/foo) can cause confusion:

      $ vault kv get secret/foo

  Please see the individual subcommand help for detailed usage information.

Subcommands:
    delete               Deletes versions in the KV store
    destroy              Permanently removes one or more versions in the KV store
    enable-versioning    Turns on versioning for a KV store
    get                  Retrieves data from the KV store
    list                 List data or secrets
    metadata             Interact with Vault's Key-Value storage
    patch                Sets or updates data in the KV store without overwriting
    put                  Sets or updates data in the KV store
    rollback             Rolls back to a previous version of data
    undelete             Undeletes versions in the KV store

Write a secret

Before you begin, check the command help.

$ vault kv put -help

The help provides command examples along with optional parameters that you can use.

Now, write a key-value secret to the path hello , with a key of foo and value of world, using the vault kv put command against the mount path secret, which is where the KV v2 secrets engine is mounted. This command creates a new version of the secrets and replaces any pre-existing data at the path if any.

$ vault kv put -mount=secret hello foo=world

== Secret Path ==
secret/data/hello

======= Metadata =======
Key                Value
---                -----
created_time       2022-06-15T19:36:54.389113Z
custom_metadata    <nil>
deletion_time      n/a
destroyed          false
version            1

You will learn about paths in more detail later, but for now it is important that the mount path to the KV v2 secrets engine is provided with -mount=secret, otherwise this example won't work. The secret mount path (which was automatically set up for you when you started your Vault server in -dev mode) is where arbitrary secrets can be read and written.

A flag provided but not defined: -mount error means you are using an older version of Vault from before this syntax was introduced. Upgrade to at least Vault 1.11, or use the old syntax (secret/hello instead of -mount=secret hello) for any commands in this guide.

With kv put you can even write multiple pieces of data.

$ vault kv put -mount=secret hello foo=world excited=yes

== Secret Path ==
secret/data/hello

======= Metadata =======
Key                Value
---                -----
created_time       2022-06-15T19:49:06.761365Z
custom_metadata    <nil>
deletion_time      n/a
destroyed          false
version            2

Notice that the version is now 2.

Warning

The examples in this tutorial use the <key>=<value> input to send secrets to Vault. However, sending data as a part of the CLI command often end up in the shell history unencrypted. To avoid this, refer to the Static Secrets: Key/Value Secrets Engine tutorial to learn different approaches.

Read a secret

As you might expect, secrets can be retrieved with vault kv get.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello

== Secret Path ==
secret/data/hello

======= Metadata =======
Key                Value
---                -----
created_time       2022-01-15T01:40:09.888293Z
custom_metadata    <nil>
deletion_time      n/a
destroyed          false
version            2

===== Data =====
Key        Value
---        -----
excited    yes
foo        world

Vault returns the latest version (in this case version 2) of the secrets at secret/hello.

To print only the value of a given field, use the -field=<key_name> flag.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret -field=excited hello

yes

Optional JSON output is very useful for scripts. For example, you can use the jq tool to extract the value of the excited secret.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret -format=json hello | jq -r .data.data.excited

yes

Delete a secret

Now that you've learned how to read and write a secret, let's go ahead and delete it. You can do so using the vault kv delete command.

$ vault kv delete -mount=secret hello

Success! Data deleted (if it existed) at: secret/data/hello

Try to read the secret you just deleted.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello

== Secret Path ==
secret/data/hello

======= Metadata =======
Key                Value
---                -----
created_time       2022-01-15T01:40:09.888293Z
custom_metadata    <nil>
deletion_time      2022-01-15T01:40:41.786995Z
destroyed          false
version            2

The output only displays the metadata with deletion_time. It does not display the data itself once it is deleted. Notice that the destroyed parameter is false which means that you can recover the deleted data if the deletion was unintentional.

$ vault kv undelete -mount=secret -versions=2 hello

Success! Data written to: secret/undelete/hello

Now, the data is recovered.

$ vault kv get -mount=secret hello

======= Metadata =======
Key                Value
---                -----
created_time       2022-01-15T01:40:09.888293Z
custom_metadata    <nil>
deletion_time      n/a
destroyed          false
version            2

===== Data =====
Key        Value
---        -----
excited    yes
foo        world

Note

This quick start tutorial only touches the surface of the key/value v2 secrets engine capabilities. To learn more, go through the Versioned Key/Value Secrets Engine tutorial which will walk you through the key/value v2 secrets engine in greater depth.

In this tutorial, you 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. Key/Value secrets engine is one of the secrets engines that Vault offers.

Continue to the Secrets Engine tutorial for a quick tour of Vault secrets engines.

You may notice other tutorials on our site using the kv CLI commands with a different syntax ($ vault kv get secret/foo instead of the $ vault kv get -mount=secret foo that we've shown you here). Either style will have the same end result, but we recommend the more explicit -mount flag syntax when working with KV secrets engine v2, as it can avoid confusion later when you need to refer to the secret by its full path (secret/data/foo) when writing policies or raw API calls.

Help and reference

This tutorial only touched the basis of the Key/Value secrets engine. To learn more about the features of Key/Value secrets engines, go through the following tutorials:

Starting the server

Secrets engines