[opensourcedex]

HashiCorp Vault is a free, open source secrets management project written in Go and released under a custom open-source licence. It has 36,260 GitHub stars, 4,759 forks and 1,435 open issues, and was last pushed 8 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #1 of 4 tracked projects in Secrets Management, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 26 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

HashiCorp Vault — Secure storage and access control for secrets and sensitive data

What is HashiCorp Vault?

What it is

Vault is a secrets management tool built in Go, designed to securely store, control access to, and manage sensitive data such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and encryption keys. It operates as a centralized service that abstracts secret access across diverse systems, providing unified APIs and enforcing strict access policies. Vault lives in the HashiCorp ecosystem and integrates with infrastructure tools like Consul for storage backends and Terraform for provisioning workflows.

It solves the problem of fragmented, insecure, and manual secret handling in modern distributed systems. Without Vault, teams rely on environment variables, hardcoded credentials, or ad-hoc scripts—leading to exposure risks, poor auditability, and no automated key rotation. Vault replaces this by offering encrypted persistent storage, dynamic secret generation, fine-grained authorization, and automatic lease-based revocation.

Key capabilities

  • Encrypts data before persisting it to storage backends (disk, Consul, AWS S3, etc.)
  • Generates dynamic secrets on-demand for databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), cloud providers (AWS IAM), and other services
  • Encrypts and decrypts data programmatically without storing the plaintext (encryption-as-a-service)
  • Enforces lease-based expiration and automatic revocation of secrets
  • Supports multiple authentication methods (token, LDAP, JWT, Kubernetes, IAM roles)
  • Maintains a detailed, immutable audit log of all secret access and operations
  • Provides policy-based access control using HCL or JSON policies

Who uses it and how

  • DevOps teams deploy Vault as a centralized secrets broker for CI/CD pipelines to inject credentials into build agents without hardcoding them
  • Cloud-native platforms use Vault with Kubernetes via the Vault Agent Injector to dynamically inject secrets into pods
  • Enterprises integrate Vault with LDAP or Active Directory to enforce role-based access to secrets for internal teams
  • Security teams use Vault’s key management features to encrypt application data at rest in databases without modifying application logic
  • Developers use Vault’s HTTP and gRPC APIs to retrieve secrets programmatically during runtime, reducing credential sprawl

Getting started

Install via package managers (apt, brew, yum) or run the official Docker image hashicorp/vault. Standalone development mode is available via vault server -dev. Production deployments require configuring storage backends (e.g., Consul, Raft), TLS, and authentication methods per the official getting started guides.

When to use it — and when not to

Use Vault when you need centralized, auditable, and revocable access to secrets across dynamic infrastructure. It replaces manual secret storage, custom key-rotation scripts, or brittle environment-based configurations. However, it requires operational overhead: you must manage its availability, storage backend, TLS termination, and backup strategy. It is overkill for static, low-risk environments where secrets are infrequently rotated and access is trivially auditable. For teams without DevOps capacity, self-hosting Vault adds complexity compared to managed cloud services like AWS Secrets Manager or Azure Key Vault, though Vault offers more advanced features like dynamic secrets and encryption-as-a-service.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Vault build ci vault enterprise

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 [email protected].

Vault Logo

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 a lease with 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, Getting Started, and Certification Exams

Documentation is available on the Vault website.

If you're new to Vault and want to get started with security automation, please check out our Getting Started guides on HashiCorp's learning platform. There are also additional guides to continue your learning.

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

Show off your Vault knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit the certification page for information about exams and find study materials on HashiCorp's learning platform.

Developing Vault

If you wish to work on Vault itself or any of its built-in systems, you'll first need Go installed on your machine.

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

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

$ make bootstrap
...

To compile a development version of Vault, run make or make dev. This will put the Vault binary in the bin and $GOPATH/bin folders:

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

To compile a development version of Vault with the UI, run make static-dist dev-ui. This will put the Vault binary in the bin and $GOPATH/bin folders:

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

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

$ make test
...

If you're developing a specific package, you can run tests for just that package by specifying the TEST variable. For example below, only vault package tests will be run.

$ make test TEST=./vault
...

Troubleshooting

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

$ git config --global --add url."[email protected]:".insteadOf "https://github.com/"

Importing Vault

This repository publishes two libraries that may be imported by other projects: github.com/hashicorp/vault/api and github.com/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 the go.mod file. 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 import github.com/hashicorp/vault into your project.

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

Acceptance Tests

Vault has comprehensive acceptance 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/modify real 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, invoke make testacc:

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

The TEST variable is required, and you should specify the folder where the backend is. The TESTARGS variable 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 no

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is HashiCorp Vault free to use?

HashiCorp Vault is open source. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does HashiCorp Vault do?

Secure storage and access control for secrets and sensitive data

What is HashiCorp Vault written in?

HashiCorp Vault is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/hashicorp/vault, and it has 36,260 GitHub stars.