Vault

Please note: We take Vault's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in Vault, please responsibly disclose by contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.

Website: https://www.vaultproject.io
Announcement list: Google Groups
Discussion forum: Discuss
Documentation: https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/
Tutorials: HashiCorp's Learn Platform
Certification Exam: Vault Associate

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 a SQL database without having to design their own encryption methods.
Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with them. 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.

Documentation, Getting Started, and Certification Exams

Documentation is available on the Vault website.

If you're new to Vault and want to get started with security automation, please check out our Getting Started guides on HashiCorp's learning platform. There are also additional guides to continue your learning.

For examples of how to interact with Vault from inside your application in different programming languages, see the vault-examples repo. An out-of-the-box sample application is also available.

Show off your Vault knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit the certification page for information about exams and find study materials on HashiCorp's learning platform.

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.

For local dev first make sure Go is properly installed, including setting up a GOPATH. Ensure that $GOPATH/bin is in your path as some distributions bundle the old version of build tools. Next, clone this repository. Vault uses Go Modules, so it is recommended that you clone the repository outside of the GOPATH. You can then download any required build tools by bootstrapping your environment:

$ make bootstrap
...

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

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

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

$ make static-dist dev-ui
...
$ bin/vault
...

To run tests, type make test. Note: this requires Docker to be installed. If this exits with exit status 0, then everything is working!

$ make test
...

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
...

Importing Vault

This repository publishes two libraries that may be imported by other projects: github.com/hashicorp/vault/api and github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk.

Note that this repository also contains Vault (the product), and as with most Go projects, Vault uses Go modules to manage its dependencies. The mechanism to do that is the go.mod file. As it happens, the presence of that file also makes it theoretically possible to import Vault as a dependency into other projects. Some other projects have made a practice of doing so in order to take advantage of testing tooling that was developed for testing Vault itself. This is not, and has never been, a supported way to use the Vault project. We aren't likely to fix bugs relating to failure to import github.com/hashicorp/vault into your project.

See also the section "Docker-based tests" below.

Acceptance Tests

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

If you're working on a feature of a secret or auth method 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.

For more information on Vault Enterprise features, visit the Vault Enterprise site.

Docker-based Tests

We have created an experimental new testing mechanism inspired by NewTestCluster. An example of how to use it:

import (
  "testing"
  "github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk/helper/testcluster/docker"
)

func Test_Something_With_Docker(t *testing.T) {
  opts := &docker.DockerClusterOptions{
    ImageRepo: "hashicorp/vault", // or "hashicorp/vault-enterprise"
    ImageTag:    "latest",
  }
  cluster := docker.NewTestDockerCluster(t, opts)
  defer cluster.Cleanup()
  
  client := cluster.Nodes()[0].APIClient()
  _, err := client.Logical().Read("sys/storage/raft/configuration")
  if err != nil {
    t.Fatal(err)
  }
}

Or for Enterprise:

import (
  "testing"
  "github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk/helper/testcluster/docker"
)

func Test_Something_With_Docker(t *testing.T) {
  opts := &docker.DockerClusterOptions{
    ImageRepo: "hashicorp/vault-enterprise",
    ImageTag:  "latest",
	VaultLicense: licenseString, // not a path, the actual license bytes
  }
  cluster := docker.NewTestDockerCluster(t, opts)
  defer cluster.Cleanup()
}

Here is a more realistic example of how we use it in practice. DefaultOptions uses hashicorp/vault:latest as the repo and tag, but it also looks at the environment variable VAULT_BINARY. If populated, it will copy the local file referenced by VAULT_BINARY into the container. This is useful when testing local changes.

Instead of setting the VaultLicense option, you can set the VAULT_LICENSE_CI environment variable, which is better than committing a license to version control.

Optionally you can set COMMIT_SHA, which will be appended to the image name we build as a debugging convenience.

func Test_Custom_Build_With_Docker(t *testing.T) {
  opts := docker.DefaultOptions(t)
  cluster := docker.NewTestDockerCluster(t, opts)
  defer cluster.Cleanup()
}

There are a variety of helpers in the github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk/helper/testcluster package, e.g. these tests below will create a pair of 3-node clusters and link them using PR or DR replication respectively, and fail if the replication state doesn't become healthy before the passed context expires.

Again, as written, these depend on having a Vault Enterprise binary locally and the env var VAULT_BINARY set to point to it, as well as having VAULT_LICENSE_CI set.

func TestStandardPerfReplication_Docker(t *testing.T) {
  opts := docker.DefaultOptions(t)
  r, err := docker.NewReplicationSetDocker(t, opts)
  if err != nil {
      t.Fatal(err)
  }
  defer r.Cleanup()

  ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), time.Minute)
  defer cancel()
  err = r.StandardPerfReplication(ctx)
  if err != nil {
    t.Fatal(err)
  }
}

func TestStandardDRReplication_Docker(t *testing.T) {
  opts := docker.DefaultOptions(t)
  r, err := docker.NewReplicationSetDocker(t, opts)
  if err != nil {
    t.Fatal(err)
  }
  defer r.Cleanup()

  ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), time.Minute)
  defer cancel()
  err = r.StandardDRReplication(ctx)
  if err != nil {
    t.Fatal(err)
  }
}

Finally, here's an example of running an existing OSS docker test with a custom binary: