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 discloseby contacting us atsecurity@hashicorp.
- Website:https:// vaultproject.io
- Announcement list:Google Groups
- Discussion forum:Discuss
- Documentation:https://developer.hashicorp /vault/docs
- Tutorials:https://developer.hashicorp /vault/tutorials
- Certification Exam:https://developer.hashicorp /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 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:Vault associates aleasewith each secret. At the end of the lease, Vault automatically revokes the 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 is available on theVault website.
If you're new to Vault and want to get started with security automation, please check out ourGetting Started guides on HashiCorp's learning platform. There are alsoadditional guides to continue your learning.
For examples of how to interact with Vault from inside your application in different programming languages, see thevault-examplesrepo. An out-of-the-boxsample applicationis also available.
Show off your Vault knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit the certification page for information about exams and findstudy materials on HashiCorp's learning platform.
If you wish to work on Vault itself or any of its built-in systems, you'll first needGoinstalled on your machine.
For local dev first make sure Go is properly installed, including setting up a
GOPATH,then setting the
GOBINvariable to$GOPATH/bin.
Ensure that$GOPATH/binis in your path as some distributions bundle the old version
of build tools.
Next, clone this repository. Vault usesGo Modules, so it is recommended that you clone the repositoryoutsideof the GOPATH. You can then download any required build tools by bootstrapping your environment:
$ make bootstrap
...To compile a development version of Vault, runmakeormake dev.This will
put the Vault binary in thebinand$GOPATH/binfolders:
$ make dev
...
$ bin/vault
...To compile a development version of Vault with the UI, runmake static-dist dev-ui.This will
put the Vault binary in thebinand$GOPATH/binfolders:
$ make static-dist dev-ui
...
$ bin/vault
...To run tests, typemake test.Note: this requires Docker to be installed. If
this exits with exit status 0, then everything is working!
$ maketest
...If you're developing a specific package, you can run tests for just that
package by specifying theTESTvariable. For example below, only
vaultpackage tests will be run.
$ maketestTEST=./vault
...If you encounter an error likecould not read Username for 'https://github 'you may need to adjust your git config like so:
$ git config --global --add url."git@github:".insteadOf"https://github /"This repository publishes two libraries that may be imported by other projects:
github /hashicorp/vault/apiandgithub /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 thego.modfile. 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 importgithub /hashicorp/vault
into your project.
See also the section "Docker-based tests" below.
Vault has comprehensiveacceptance 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/modifyreal 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, invokemake testacc:
$ make testacc TEST=./builtin/logical/consul
...TheTESTvariable is required, and you should specify the folder where the
backend is. TheTESTARGSvariable 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 theVault Enterprise site.
We have created an experimental new testing mechanism inspired by NewTestCluster. An example of how to use it:
import(
"testing"
"github /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 /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 uses
hashicorp/vault:latestas 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.
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 /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.
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_binary
ok github /hashicorp/vault/vault/external_tests/raft/raft_binary 20.960s
