Vault Part 1- Starting Up Vault
Goal: This post aims to get a dev mode Vault up and running on your local as part of a series of posts starting from here.
What we need
- Some sort of command prompt/bash/shell/stone tablets to run vault commands
Before getting to the fancy engines and other things, we need to get Vault running first if we don’t have access to one already.
Installing Vault
- Download Vault from here: https://www.vaultproject.io/downloads
- Setup your PATH env var to wherever vault.exe will be
- You will need to use cli for a bit, I’m using cmder if you want to check it out.
Starting up Vault
Vault has two modes, Dev and Prod. As with other tech of similar sorts, dev mode (the one we want) has less security and also no volumes so all secrets are going to be in memory which will be lost at restart.
Typing help on the vault server command brings up some more insight.
vault server --help
lets get the dev mode running;
vault server -devif you get access denied like below, run your cli as admin.
Comes with a nifty warning as well. We also should get the VAULT_ADDR env var set while we are at it. Also let’s save the unseal key and the root token for later.
Now that’s about it with installation of Vault. Let’s check out the UI from http://localhost:8200/
We need to use the root token shown previously to proceed.
We should also try to use the cli as well as much as we can to get used to it since UIs can be finicky. I’m sure many Git/Linux admins and users are in agreement.
Anyways we will use the status command to check how the Vault dev mode we started is doing.
typing vault status, we get the following;
If you get an error like below, notice that it’s trying to go to an https site but we exposed Vault API from http while starting via dev mode so double check you VAULT_ADDR env that we set previously is correct.
That’s all for this story. Thanks for reading and see you next time.
