New Hashicorp Vault For Secrets Management 2025

## Installing and Integrating Vault: A Practical Guide

HashiCorp Vault is a powerful secret management tool, offering a secure way to store and control access to sensitive information such as passwords, API keys, certificates, and tokens. This article will guide you through the process of installing, initializing, creating secrets and policies, and finally, how to integrate Vault with a Node.js application.

First, you'll need to install Vault on your system. Installation options vary depending on your operating system. Below are some examples:

After installation, verify that Vault was installed correctly by running the command vault --version in your terminal.

After installation, the next step is to initialize Vault. Run the command vault operator init. This command will generate a set of encryption keys (unseal keys) and a \"root token\" value. It's crucial that you store the keys securely, as they are needed to unlock Vault. The \"root token\" grants full administrative access to Vault; keep it with care.

Before using Vault, it needs to be unsealed. To do this, use the command vault operator unseal. You will need to provide a certain number of \"Unseal Keys\" (usually 3 or more) to unseal Vault. Execute this command repeatedly, providing one of the keys each time.

Now that Vault is unsealed, you need to authenticate. We will use the root token initially. Set the environment variable VAULT_TOKEN with the value of the \"Initial Root Token\" that was generated during initialization.

You can verify the authentication with the command vault status.

Vault stores secrets in a hierarchical storage system. Let's create a simple secret.

Enabling the Secrets Engine: First, we need to enable the \"kv\" (key-value) Secrets Engine, which is used to store arbitrary data.

Source: Dev.to