Install Vault

5min
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Vault
Video

Vault must first be installed on your machine. Vault is available as source code, as a pre-compiled binary, or in packaged formats.

This page will not cover how to compile Vault from source, but compiling from source is covered in the documentation for those who want to be sure they're compiling source they trust into the final binary.

Install Vault

To install Vault, find the appropriate package for your system and download it. Vault is packaged as a zip archive.

After downloading Vault, unzip the package. Vault runs as a single binary named vault. Any other files in the package can be safely removed and Vault will still function.

The final step is to make sure that the vault binary is available on the PATH. See this page for instructions on setting the PATH on Linux and Mac. This page contains instructions for setting the PATH on Windows.

Note

To use Homebrew with macOS, you need to have Command Line Tools (CLT) for Xcode installed as described in the Homebrew installation documentation. If you encounter an error like xcrun: error: invalid active developer path when following these steps, ensure that you have installed the latest CLT for Xcode and try again.

Homebrew is a free and open-source package management system for Mac OS X. Install the official Vault formula from the terminal.

First, install the HashiCorp tap, a repository of all our Homebrew packages.

$ brew tap hashicorp/tap

Now, install Vault with hashicorp/tap/vault.

$ brew install hashicorp/tap/vault

Note

This installs a signed binary and is automatically updated with every new official release.

To update to the latest, run

$ brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/vault

HashiCorp does not maintain the following installation options. The latest version of Vault is always available by manual installation.

Chocolatey is a free and open-source package management system for Windows. Install the Vault package from the command-line.

$ choco install vault

Note

Chocolatey and the Vault package are NOT directly maintained by HashiCorp.

Scoop is a free and open-source package management system for Windows. Install Vault from the command-line.

$ scoop install vault

Note

The Scoop main bucket repository is NOT maintained by HashiCorp.

HashiCorp officially maintains and signs packages for the following Linux distributions.

Add PGP for the package signing key.

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install gpg

Please follow the instructions in the Official Packaging Guide to install the HashiCorp GPG key, verify the key's fingerprint, and install Vault.

Install yum-config-manager to manage your repositories.

$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils

Use yum-config-manager to add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo

Install.

$ sudo yum -y install vault

Install dnf config-manager to manage your repositories.

$ sudo dnf install -y dnf-plugins-core

Use dnf config-manager to add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/fedora/hashicorp.repo

Install.

sudo dnf -y install vault

Install yum-config-manager to manage your repositories.

$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils

Use yum-config-manager to add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/AmazonLinux/hashicorp.repo

Install.

$ sudo yum -y install vault

Note

To install Vault Enterprise, replace install vault with install vault-enterprise.

Tip

Now that you have added the HashiCorp repository, you can install Terraform, Consul, Nomad and Packer with the same command.

Verifying the Installation

After installing Vault, verify the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and checking that the vault binary is available. By executing vault, you should see help output similar to the following:

$ vault

Usage: vault <command> [args]

Common commands:
    read        Read data and retrieves secrets
    write       Write data, configuration, and secrets
    delete      Delete secrets and configuration
    list        List data or secrets
    login       Authenticate locally
    agent       Start a Vault agent
    server      Start a Vault server
    status      Print seal and HA status
    unwrap      Unwrap a wrapped secret

Other commands:
    audit          Interact with audit devices
    auth           Interact with auth methods
    debug          Runs the debug command
    kv             Interact with Vault's Key-Value storage
    lease          Interact with leases
    monitor        Stream log messages from a Vault server
    namespace      Interact with namespaces
    operator       Perform operator-specific tasks
    path-help      Retrieve API help for paths
    plugin         Interact with Vault plugins and catalog
    policy         Interact with policies
    print          Prints runtime configurations
    secrets        Interact with secrets engines
    ssh            Initiate an SSH session
    token          Interact with tokens

If you get an error that the binary could not be found, then your PATH environment variable was not setup properly. Please go back and ensure that your PATH variable contains the directory where Vault was installed.

Otherwise, Vault is installed and ready to go!

What is Vault

Starting the server

This tutorial also appears in:

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Manage Vault environment as well as your secrets using Vault UI.
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