Azure Key Vault helps solve the following problems:
- Secrets management (this library) - securely store and control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets
- Cryptographic key management
(
azure-keyvault-keys
) - create, store, and control access to the keys used to encrypt your data - Certificate management
(
azure-keyvault-certificates
) - create, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates
Source code | Package (PyPI) | API reference documentation | Product documentation | Samples
Install the Azure Key Vault Secrets client library for Python with pip:
pip install azure-keyvault-secrets
- An Azure subscription
- Python 2.7, 3.5.3, or later
- A Key Vault. If you need to create one, you can use the
Azure Cloud Shell to create one with these commands
(replace
"my-resource-group"
and"my-key-vault"
with your own, unique names):-
(Optional) if you want a new resource group to hold the Key Vault:
az group create --name my-resource-group --location westus2
-
Create the Key Vault:
az keyvault create --resource-group my-resource-group --name my-key-vault
Output:
{ "id": "...", "location": "westus2", "name": "my-key-vault", "properties": { "accessPolicies": [...], "createMode": null, "enablePurgeProtection": null, "enableSoftDelete": null, "enabledForDeployment": false, "enabledForDiskEncryption": null, "enabledForTemplateDeployment": null, "networkAcls": null, "provisioningState": "Succeeded", "sku": { "name": "standard" }, "tenantId": "...", "vaultUri": "https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/" }, "resourceGroup": "my-resource-group", "type": "Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults" }
The
"vaultUri"
property is thevault_endpoint
used bySecretClient
-
In order to interact with a Key Vault's secrets, you'll need an instance of the
SecretClient
class. Creating one requires a vault url and
credential. This document demonstrates using DefaultAzureCredential
as
the credential, authenticating with a service principal's client id, secret,
and tenant id. Other authentication methods are supported. See the
azure-identity documentation for more details.
This Azure Cloud Shell snippet shows how to create a new service principal. Before using it, replace "your-application-name" with a more appropriate name for your service principal.
-
Create a service principal:
az ad sp create-for-rbac --name http://my-application --skip-assignment
Output:
{ "appId": "generated app id", "displayName": "my-application", "name": "http://my-application", "password": "random password", "tenant": "tenant id" }
-
Use the output to set AZURE_CLIENT_ID (appId), AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET (password) and AZURE_TENANT_ID (tenant) environment variables. The following example shows a way to do this in Bash:
export AZURE_CLIENT_ID="generated app id" export AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET="random password" export AZURE_TENANT_ID="tenant id"
-
Authorize the service principal to perform key operations in your Key Vault:
az keyvault set-policy --name my-key-vault --spn $AZURE_CLIENT_ID --key-permissions backup delete get list create
Possible key permissions:
- Key management: backup, delete, get, list, purge, recover, restore, create, update, import
- Cryptographic operations: decrypt, encrypt, unwrapKey, wrapKey, verify, sign
After setting the AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET and
AZURE_TENANT_ID environment variables, you can create the
SecretClient
:
from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.secrets import SecretClient
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
secret_client = SecretClient(vault_endpoint=<your-vault-url>, credential=credential)
With a SecretClient
, you can get secrets from the vault, create new secrets
and update their values, and delete secrets, as shown in the
examples below.
A Secret consists of a secret value and its associated metadata and management information. For this library secret values are strings, but Azure Key Vault doesn't store them as such. For more information about secrets and how Key Vault stores and manages them, see the Key Vault documentation .
This section contains code snippets covering common tasks:
- Retrieve a Secret
- Update Secret metadata
- Delete a Secret
- List Secrets
- Async create a Secret
- Async list Secrets
set_secret
creates a Secret in the vault. If a secret with the same name
already exists, a new version of that secret is created.
secret = secret_client.set_secret("secret-name", "secret-value")
print(secret.name)
print(secret.value)
print(secret.properties.version)
get_secret
retrieves a secret previously stored in the Key Vault.
secret = secret_client.get_secret("secret-name")
print(secret.name)
print(secret.value)
update_secret
updates a secret's metadata. It cannot change the secret's
value; use set_secret
to set a secret's value.
# Clients may specify the content type of a secret to assist in interpreting the secret data when it's retrieved
content_type = "text/plain"
# You can specify additional application-specific metadata in the form of tags.
tags = {"foo": "updated tag"}
updated_secret_properties = secret_client.update_secret_properties("secret-name", content_type=content_type, tags=tags)
print(updated_secret_properties.updated)
print(updated_secret_properties.content_type)
print(updated_secret_properties.tags)
delete_secret
deletes a secret. If soft-delete is not enabled
for the vault, this permanently deletes the secret.
deleted_secret = secret_client.delete_secret("secret-name")
print(deleted_secret.name)
print(deleted_secret.properties.deleted_date)
This example lists all the secrets in the vault. The list doesn't include
secret values; use get_secret
to get a secret's value.
secret_properties = secret_client.list_secrets()
for secret_property in secret_properties:
# the list doesn't include values or versions of the secrets
print(secret_property.name)
This library includes a complete async API supported on Python 3.5+. To use it, you must
first install an async transport, such as aiohttp
.
See
azure-core documentation
for more information.
This example creates a secret in the Key Vault with the specified optional arguments.
from azure.identity.aio import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.secrets.aio import SecretClient
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
secret_client = SecretClient(vault_endpoint=vault_endpoint, credential=credential)
secret = await secret_client.set_secret("secret-name", "secret-value")
print(secret.name)
print(secret.value)
print(secret.properties.version)
This example lists all the secrets in the specified Key Vault.
secret_properties = secret_client.list_secrets()
async for secret_property in secret_properties:
# the list doesn't include values or versions of the secrets
print(secret_property.name)
Key Vault clients raise exceptions defined in azure-core
.
For example, if you try to get a key that doesn't exist in the vault,
SecretClient
raises ResourceNotFoundError
:
from azure.core.exceptions import ResourceNotFoundError
secret_client.delete_secret("my-secret")
try:
secret_client.get_secret("my-secret")
except ResourceNotFoundError as e:
print(e.message)
Network trace logging is disabled by default for this library. When enabled,
HTTP requests will be logged at DEBUG level using the logging
library. You
can configure logging to print debugging information to stdout or write it
to a file:
import sys
import logging
# Create a logger for the 'azure' SDK
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
# Configure a console output
handler = logging.StreamHandler(stream=sys.stdout)
logger.addHandler(handler)
# Configure a file output
file_handler = logging.FileHandler(filename)
logger.addHandler(file_handler)
# Enable network trace logging. Each HTTP request will be logged at DEBUG level.
client = SecretClient(vault_endpoint=url, credential=credential, logging_enable=True)
Network trace logging can also be enabled for any single operation:
secret = secret_client.get_secret("secret-name", logging_enable=True)
Several samples are available in the Azure SDK for Python GitHub repository. These provide example code for additional Key Vault scenarios:
- test_samples_secrets.py and test_samples_secrets_async.py - code snippets from the library's documentation
- hello_world.py and hello_world_async.py - create/get/update/delete secrets
- list_operations.py and list_operations_async.py - list secrets
For more extensive documentation on Azure Key Vault, see the API reference documentation.
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.
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