Create Secrets in Hashicorp Vault Using 2 Easy Ways

Photo by Maxim Zhgulev on Unsplash

Create secrets in Hashicorp Vault is one of the most important and relevant things you can do once you have installed Hashicorp Vault on your environment, probably by recovering and getting these secrets from the components they need it. But in today’s article, we will focus on the first part so you can learn how easily you can create secrets in Hashicorp Vault.

In previous articles we commented on the importance of Hashicorp Vault and the installation process, as you can read here. Hence, at this point, we already have our vault ready to start working with it wholly initialized and unseal to be able to start serving requests.

Create Secrets in Hashicorp Vault using Hashicorp Vault CLI Commands

All the commands we will do will use a critical component named Hashicorp Vault CLI, and you will notice that because all of our commands will start with vault. To be honest, we already started with that in the previous article; if you remember, we already run some of these commands to initialize or unseal the vault, but now this will be our main component to interact with.

The first thing we need to do is to be able to log into the vault, and to do that; we are going to use the root token that was provided to us when we initialized the vault; we are going to store this vault in an environment variable so it will be easy to work with it. All the commands we are going to run now are going to be inside the vault agent server pod, as shown in the picture below:

Once we are inside of it, we are going to do the log command with the following syntax:

vault login

And we will get an output similar to this one:

If we do not provide the token in advance, the console will ask for the token to be typed afterward, and it will be automatically hidden, as you can see in the picture below: