Simple Spring Cloud Vault demo

With your project set up, you can install and launch HashiCorp Vault. If you are using a Mac with homebrew, this is as simple as:

brew install vault or brew upgrade vault

Start vault server

After you install Vault, launch it in a console window. This command also starts up a server process.

vault server --dev --dev-root-token-id="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" You should see the following as one of the last output lines:

[INFO ] core: post-unseal setup complete

The command above starts Vault in development mode using in-memory storage without transport encryption.

Use vault cli to add secrets to the vault server

Launch another console window to store application configuration in Vault using the Vault command line. First, you need to set two environment variables to point the Vault CLI to the Vault endpoint and provide an authentication token.

export export VAULT_TOKEN="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
export VAULT_ADDR="http://127.0.0.1:8200"

Now you can store a configuration key-value pairs inside Vault:

vault kv put secret/gs-vault-config example.username=demouser example.password=demopassword
vault kv put secret/gs-vault-config/cloud example.username=clouduser example.password=cloudpassword

Now you have written two entries in Vault secret/gs-vault-config and secret/gs-vault-config/cloud.

Imp things to note about the key-value pair

Note the format of the paths

/secret/{application}/{profile}
/secret/{application}
/secret/{defaultContext}/{profile}
/secret/{defaultContext}

Spring Cloud Vault constructs a Vault context path from spring.application.name which is gs-vault-config
appends the profile name (--spring.profiles.active=cloud) so enabling the cloud profile will fetch additionally configuration properties from secret/gs-vault-config/cloud,
Here, prefix of the configuration property is example Note that this is used in the configuration class as @ConfigurationProperties("example")

Note on use of `bootstrap.properties` instead of `application.properties`

Spring Cloud Configuration integrations use the bootstrap context for their configuration. Bootstrap context is configured before spinning up the application context so configuration integrations can load and initialize PropertySources that are then used in the application context. As a consequence, rename your application.properties to bootstrap.properties.

Run the demo

Run application with default profile - ./run.sh

Run application with cloud profile -
./run-cloud.sh

Cleanup

pkill vault

msathe-tech/vault-demo