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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 atsecurity@hashicorp.com.

• Website:https://www.vaultproject.io
• Announcement list:Google Groups
• Discussion forum:Discuss
• Documentation:https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/docs
• Tutorials:https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/tutorials
• Certification Exam:https://developer.hashicorp.com/certifications/security-automation

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: Vault can store arbitrary key/value pairs. Vault encrypts data before writing it to persistentstorage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to accessyour secrets. Vault can write to disk,Consul,and more.

• Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for somesystems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an applicationneeds to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vaultwill generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. Aftercreating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke themafter the lease is up.

• Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storingit. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters anddevelopers to store encrypted data in a location such as a SQL database withouthaving to design their own encryption methods.

• Leasing and Renewal: Vault associates alease with each secret.At the end of the lease, Vault automatically revokes thesecret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.

• Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vaultcan 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 thecase of an intrusion.

Documentation is available on theVault website.

If you're new to Vault and want to get started with security automation, pleasecheck out ourGetting Started guideson HashiCorp's learning platform. There are alsoadditional guidesto continue your learning.

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

Show off your Vault knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit thecertification pagefor information about exams and findstudy materialson HashiCorp's learning platform.

If you wish to work on Vault itself or any of its built-in systems, you'llfirst needGo installed on your machine.

For local dev first make sure Go is properly installed, including setting up aGOPATH, then setting theGOBIN variable to$GOPATH/bin.Ensure that$GOPATH/bin is in your path as some distributions bundle the old versionof build tools.

Next, clone this repository. Vault usesGo Modules,so it is recommended that you clone the repositoryoutside of the GOPATH.You can then download any required build tools by bootstrapping your environment:

$ make bootstrap...

To compile a development version of Vault, runmake ormake dev. This willput the Vault binary in thebin and$GOPATH/bin folders:

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

To compile a development version of Vault with the UI, runmake static-dist dev-ui. This willput the Vault binary in thebin and$GOPATH/bin folders:

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

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

$ maketest...

If you're developing a specific package, you can run tests for just thatpackage by specifying theTEST variable. For example below, onlyvault package tests will be run.

$ maketest TEST=./vault...

If you encounter an error likecould not read Username for 'https://github.com' you may need to adjust your git config like so:

$ git config --global --add url."git@github.com:".insteadOf"https://github.com/"

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

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

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

Vault has comprehensiveacceptance testscovering 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 toverify it is functioning (and also hasn't broken anything else), we recommendrunning the acceptance tests.

Warning: The acceptance tests create/destroy/modifyreal resources, whichmay incur real costs in some cases. In the presence of a bug, it is technicallypossible 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 backendyou're testing.

To run the acceptance tests, invokemake testacc:

$ make testacc TEST=./builtin/logical/consul...

TheTEST variable is required, and you should specify the folder where thebackend is. TheTESTARGS variable is recommended to filter down to a specificresource to test, since testing all of them at once can sometimes take a verylong time.

Acceptance tests typically require other environment variables to be set forthings such as access keys. The test itself should error early and tellyou what to set, so it is not documented here.

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

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

Or for Enterprise:

import ("testing""github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk/helper/testcluster/docker")funcTest_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)defercluster.Cleanup()}

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

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

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

funcTest_Custom_Build_With_Docker(t*testing.T) {opts:=docker.DefaultOptions(t)cluster:=docker.NewTestDockerCluster(t,opts)defercluster.Cleanup()}

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

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

funcTestStandardPerfReplication_Docker(t*testing.T) {opts:=docker.DefaultOptions(t)r,err:=docker.NewReplicationSetDocker(t,opts)iferr!=nil {t.Fatal(err)  }deferr.Cleanup()ctx,cancel:=context.WithTimeout(context.Background(),time.Minute)defercancel()err=r.StandardPerfReplication(ctx)iferr!=nil {t.Fatal(err)  }}funcTestStandardDRReplication_Docker(t*testing.T) {opts:=docker.DefaultOptions(t)r,err:=docker.NewReplicationSetDocker(t,opts)iferr!=nil {t.Fatal(err)  }deferr.Cleanup()ctx,cancel:=context.WithTimeout(context.Background(),time.Minute)defercancel()err=r.StandardDRReplication(ctx)iferr!=nil {t.Fatal(err)  }}

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

$ GOOS=linux make dev$ VAULT_BINARY=$(pwd)/bin/vault gotest -run'TestRaft_Configuration_Docker' ./vault/external_tests/raft/raft_binaryok      github.com/hashicorp/vault/vault/external_tests/raft/raft_binary        20.960s