Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides a secure storage of secrets, such as passwords and database connection strings. Secret client library allows you to securely store and tightly control the access to tokens, passwords, API keys, and other secrets. This library offers operations to create, retrieve, update, delete, purge, backup, restore and list the secrets and its versions.
Source code | Package (PyPI) | API reference documentation | Product documentation | Samples
Install the Azure Key Vault client library for Python with pip:
pip install azure-keyvault-secrets
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Python 2.7, 3.4 or later to use this package.
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An existing Key Vault. If you need to create a Key Vault, you can use the Azure Cloud Shell to create one with this Azure CLI command. Replace
<your-resource-group-name>
and<your-key-vault-name>
with your own, unique names:az keyvault create --resource-group <your-resource-group-name> --name <your-key-vault-name>
In order to interact with the Key Vault service, you'll need to create an instance of the SecretClient class. You would need a vault url and client secret credentials (client id, client secret, tenant id) to instantiate a client object for using the DefaultAzureCredential
examples in the README. DefaultAzureCredential
authentication by providing client secret credentials is being used in this getting started section but you can find more ways to authenticate with azure-identity.
Use the Azure Cloud Shell snippet below to create/get client secret credentials.
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Create a service principal and configure its access to Azure resources:
az ad sp create-for-rbac -n <your-application-name> --skip-assignment
Output:
{ "appId": "generated-app-ID", "displayName": "dummy-app-name", "name": "http://dummy-app-name", "password": "random-password", "tenant": "tenant-ID" }
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Use the credentials returned above to set AZURE_CLIENT_ID(appId), AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET(password) and (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"
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Grant the above mentioned application authorization to perform secret operations on the keyvault:
az keyvault set-policy --name <your-key-vault-name> --spn $AZURE_CLIENT_ID --secret-permissions backup delete get list set
--secret-permissions: Accepted values: backup, delete, get, list, purge, recover, restore, set
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Use the above mentioned Key Vault name to retrieve details of your Vault which also contains your Key Vault URL:
az keyvault show --name <your-key-vault-name>
Once you've populated the AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET and AZURE_TENANT_ID environment variables and replaced your-vault-url with the above returned URI, you can create the SecretClient:
from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.secrets import SecretClient
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
# Create a new secret client using the default credential
secret_client = SecretClient(vault_url=<your-vault-url>, credential=credential)
A secret is the fundamental resource within Azure KeyVault. From a developer's perspective, Key Vault APIs accept and return secret values as strings. In addition to the secret data, the following attributes may be specified:
- expires: Identifies the expiration time on or after which the secret data should not be retrieved.
- not_before: Identifies the time after which the secret will be active.
- enabled: Specifies whether the secret data can be retrieved.
- created: Indicates when this version of the secret was created.
- updated: Indicates when this version of the secret was updated.
The Secret client performs the interactions with the Azure Key Vault service for getting, setting, updating,deleting, and listing secrets and its versions. An asynchronous and synchronous, SecretClient, client exists in the SDK allowing for selection of a client based on an application's use case. Once you've initialized a SecretClient, you can interact with the primary resource types in Key Vault.
The following section provides several code snippets using the above created secret_client
, covering some of the most common Azure Key Vault Secret service related tasks, including:
- Create a Secret
- Retrieve a Secret
- Update an existing Secret
- Delete a Secret
- List Secrets
- Async create a Secret
- Async list Secrets
set_secret
creates a Secret to be stored in the Azure Key Vault. If a secret with the same name already exists, then a new version of the secret is created.
secret = secret_client.set_secret("secret-name", "secret-value")
print(secret.name)
print(secret.value)
print(secret.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 previously stored in the Key Vault.
# 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 = secret_client.update_secret("secret-name", content_type=content_type, tags=tags)
print(updated_secret.name)
print(updated_secret.version)
print(updated_secret.updated)
print(updated_secret.content_type)
print(updated_secret.tags)
delete_secret
deletes a secret previously stored in the Key Vault. When soft-delete is not enabled for the Key Vault, this operation permanently deletes the secret.
deleted_secret = secret_client.delete_secret("secret-name")
print(deleted_secret.name)
print(deleted_secret.deleted_date)
This example lists all the secrets in the specified Key Vault.
secrets = secret_client.list_secrets()
for secret in secrets:
# the list doesn't include values or versions of the secrets
print(secret.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
# for async operations use DefaultAzureCredential
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
# Create a new secret client using the default credential
secret_client = SecretClient(vault_url=vault_url, credential=credential)
secret = await secret_client.set_secret("secret-name", "secret-value")
print(secret.name)
print(secret.value)
print(secret.version)
This example lists all the secrets in the specified Key Vault.
secrets = secret_client.list_secrets()
async for secret in secrets:
# the list doesn't include values or versions of the secrets
print(secret.name)
Key Vault clients raise exceptions defined in azure-core. For more detailed infromation about exceptions and how to deal with them, see Azure Core exceptions.
For example, if you try to retrieve a secret after it is deleted a 404
error is returned, indicating resource not found. In the following snippet, the error is handled gracefully by catching the exception and displaying additional information about the error.
try:
secret_client.get_secret("deleted_secret")
except ResourceNotFoundError as e:
print(e.message)
Output: "Secret not found:deleted_secret"
Network trace logging is disabled by default for this library. When enabled, this will be logged at DEBUG level. The logging policy is used to output the HTTP network trace to the configured logger. You can configure logging to print out debugging information to the stdout or write it to a file using the following example:
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. This will be logged at DEBUG level.
# By default, network trace logging is disabled.
config = SecretClient.create_config(credential, logging_enable=True)
client = SecretClient(url, credential, config=config)
The logger can also be enabled per operation.
secret = secret_client.get_secret("secret-name", logging_enable=True)
Several KeyVault Python SDK samples are available to you in the SDK's GitHub repository. These samples provide example code for additional scenarios commonly encountered while working with Key Vault:
- test_samples_secrets.py and test_samples_secrets_async.py - Contains the code snippets working with Key Vault secrets.
- hello_world.py and hello_world_async.py - Python code for working with Azure Key Vault, including:
- Create a secret
- Get an existing secret
- Update an existing secret
- Delete secret
- list_operations.py and list_operations_async.py - Example code for working with Key Vault secrets backup and recovery, including:
- Create secrets
- List all secrets in the Key Vault
- Update secrets in the Key Vault
- List versions of a specified secret
- Delete secrets from the Key Vault
- List deleted secrets in the Key Vault
For more extensive documentation on Azure Key Vault, see the API reference documentation.
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