Vault Plugin: Key-Value Secrets Backend

This is a standalone backend plugin for use with Hashicorp Vault. This plugin provides Key-Value functionality to 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.

Quick Links

- Vault Website: https://www.vaultproject.io
- KV Docs: https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/kv/index.html
- Main Project Github: https://www.github.com/hashicorp/vault

Getting Started

This is a Vault plugin and is meant to work with Vault. This guide assumes you have already installed Vault and have a basic understanding of how Vault works.

Otherwise, first read this guide on how to get started with Vault.

To learn specifically about how plugins work, see documentation on Vault plugins.

Usage

Please see documentation for the plugin on the Vault website.

This plugin is currently built into Vault and by default is accessed at kv. To enable this in a running Vault server:

$ vault secrets enable kv
Success! Enabled the kv secrets engine at: kv/

Additionally starting with Vault 0.10 this backend is by default mounted at secret/.

Developing

If you wish to work on this plugin, you'll first need Go installed on your machine (version 1.10+ is required).

For local dev first make sure Go is properly installed, including setting up a GOPATH. Next, clone this repository into $GOPATH/src/github.com/hashicorp/vault-plugin-secrets-kv. You can then download any required build tools by bootstrapping your environment:

$ make bootstrap

To compile a development version of this plugin, run make or make dev. This will put the plugin binary in the bin and $GOPATH/bin folders. dev mode will only generate the binary for your platform and is faster:

$ make
$ make dev

Once you've done that, there are two approaches to testing your new plugin version in Vault. You can add a temporary replace declaration in your local Vault checkout's go.mod (above the require declarations), such as:

replace github.com/hashicorp/vault-plugin-secrets-kv => /path/to/your/project/vault-plugin-secrets-kv

Alternatively, you could go through the plugin process. To do this, put the plugin binary into a location of your choice. This directory will be specified as the plugin_directory in the Vault config used to start the server.

...
plugin_directory = "path/to/plugin/directory"
...

Start a Vault server with this config file:

$ vault server -config=path/to/config.json ...
...

Once the server is started, register the plugin in the Vault server's plugin catalog:

$ vault plugin register \
        -sha256=<expected SHA256 Hex value of the plugin binary> \
        -command="vault-plugin-secrets-kv" \
        secret \
        kv

Note you should generate a new sha256 checksum if you have made changes to the plugin. Example using openssl:

openssl dgst -sha256 $GOPATH/vault-plugin-secrets-kv
...
SHA256(.../go/bin/vault-plugin-secrets-kv)= 896c13c0f5305daed381952a128322e02bc28a57d0c862a78cbc2ea66e8c6fa1

Enable the auth plugin backend using the secrets enable plugin command:

$ vault secrets enable -plugin-name='kv' plugin
...

Successfully enabled 'plugin' at 'kv'!

Tests

If you are developing this plugin and want to verify it is still functioning (and you haven't broken anything else), we recommend running the tests.

To run the tests, invoke make test:

$ make test

You can also specify a TESTARGS variable to filter tests like so:

$ make test TESTARGS='--run=TestConfig'