Quick Start

Prerequisites

To get started with Vault and this guide you need a *NIX-like operating systems that provides:

• wget, openssl and unzip

• at least Java 7 and a properly configured JAVA_HOME environment variable

Install Vault

$ src/test/bash/install_vault.sh

Create SSL certificates for Vault

$ src/test/bash/create_certificates.sh

Start Vault server

$ src/test/bash/local_run_vault.sh

Vault is started listening on 0.0.0.0:8200 using the inmem storage and https. Vault is sealed and not initialized when starting up so you need to initialize it first.

$ export VAULT_ADDR="https://localhost:8200"
$ export VAULT_SKIP_VERIFY=true # Don't do this for production
$ vault init

You should see something like:

Key 1: 7149c6a2e16b8833f6eb1e76df03e47f6113a3288b3093faf5033d44f0e70fe701
Key 2: 901c534c7988c18c20435a85213c683bdcf0efcd82e38e2893779f152978c18c02
Key 3: 03ff3948575b1165a20c20ee7c3e6edf04f4cdbe0e82dbff5be49c63f98bc03a03
Key 4: 216ae5cc3ddaf93ceb8e1d15bb9fc3176653f5b738f5f3d1ee00cd7dccbe926e04
Key 5: b2898fc8130929d569c1677ee69dc5f3be57d7c4b494a6062693ce0b1c4d93d805
Initial Root Token: 19aefa97-cccc-bbbb-aaaa-225940e63d76

Vault initialized with 5 keys and a key threshold of 3\. Please
securely distribute the above keys. When the Vault is re-sealed,
restarted, or stopped, you must provide at least 3 of these keys
to unseal it again.

Vault does not store the master key. Without at least 3 keys,
your Vault will remain permanently sealed.

Vault will initialize and return a set of unsealing keys and the root token. Pick 3 keys and unseal Vault. Store the Vault token in the VAULT_TOKEN environment variable.

$ vault unseal (Key 1)
$ vault unseal (Key 2)
$ vault unseal (Key 3)
$ export VAULT_TOKEN=(Root token)

Spring Cloud Vault accesses different resources. By default, the secret backend is enabled which accesses secret config settings via JSON endpoints.

The HTTP service has resources in the form:

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

where the "application" is injected as the spring.application.name in the SpringApplication (i.e. what is normally "application" in a regular Spring Boot app), "profile" is an active profile (or comma-separated list of properties). Properties retrieved from Vault will be used "as-is" without further prefixing of the property names.