Azure KeyVault Secrets client library for JS

Azure KeyVault is a service that allows you to encrypt authentication keys, storage account keys, data encryption keys, .pfx files, and passwords by using keys that are protected by hardware security modules (HSMs).

Azure KeyVault Secrets management allows you to securely store and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets.

Use the client library for Azure KeyVault Secrets in your Node.js application to

• Get, set and delete a secret.
• Update a secret and it's attributes.
• Backup and restore a secret.
• Get, purge or recover a deleted secret.
• Get all the versions of a secret.
• Get all secrets.
• Get all deleted secrets.

Source code | Package (npm) | API Reference Documentation | Product documentation | Samples

Getting started

Install the package

Install the Azure Event KeyVault Secrets client library using npm

npm install @azure/keyvault-secrets

Prerequisites: You must have an Azure subscription and a KeyVault resource to use this package. If you are using this package in a Node.js application, then use Node.js 6.x or higher.

Configure Typescript

TypeScript users need to have Node type definitions installed:

npm install @types/node

You also need to enable compilerOptions.allowSyntheticDefaultImports in your tsconfig.json. Note that if you have enabled compilerOptions.esModuleInterop, allowSyntheticDefaultImports is enabled by default. See TypeScript's compiler options handbook for more information.

Configuring your Key Vault

Use the Azure Cloud Shell snippet below to create/get client secret credentials.

• 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"
  }

• Use the above returned credentials information 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"

• 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

• 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>

Authenticate the client

To use the key vault from TypeScript/JavaScript, you need to first authenticate with the key vault service. To authenticate, first we import the identity and SecretsClient, which will connect to the key vault.

import { EnvironmentCredential } from "@azure/identity";
import { SecretsClient } from "@azure/keyvault-secrets";

Once these are imported, we can next connect to the key vault service. To do this, we'll need to copy some settings from the key vault we are connecting to into our environment variables. Once they are in our environment, we can access them with the following code:

// EnvironmentCredential expects the following three environment variables:
// * AZURE_TENANT_ID: The tenant ID in Azure Active Directory
// * AZURE_CLIENT_ID: The application (client) ID registered in the AAD tenant
// * AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET: The client secret for the registered application
const credential = new EnvironmentCredential();

// Build the URL to reach your key vault
const vaultName = "<YOUR KEYVAULT NAME>";
const url = `https://${vaultName}.vault.azure.net`;

// Lastly, create our secrets client and connect to the service
const client = new SecretsClient(url, credential);

Key concepts

Creating secrets and secret versions

Azure Key Vault allows you to create secrets that are stored in the key vault. When a secret is first created, it is given a name and a value. This name acts as a way to reach the secret later.

Secrets in the key vault can have multiple versions of the same secret. These are called versions of that secret.

Getting secrets from the key vault

The simplest way to read secrets back from the vault is to get a secret by name. This will retrieve the most recent version of the secret. You can optionally get a different version of the secret if you also know the version you want.

Key vaults also support listing the secrets they have, as well as listing the all the versions of the given secret.

Updating secret attributes

Once a secret is created, it is possible to update attributes of the secret. For example, if a secret needs to be temporarily unavailable, the enabled attribute can be set to false for a time.

Working with deleted secrets

Key vaults allow deleting secrets so that they are no longer available.

In key vaults with 'soft delete' enabled, secrets are not immediately removed but instead marked simply as 'deleted'. These deleted secrets can be listed, purged, and recovered.

Examples

The following sections provide code snippets that cover some of the common tasks using Azure KeyVault Secrets.

Once you have authenticated and created an instance of an SecretsClient class (see "Authenticate the client" above), you can create, read, update, and delete secrets:

Create a secret

setSecret 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.

const secretName = "MySecretName";
const result = await client.setSecret(secretName, "MySecretValue");

Get a secret

getSecret retrieves a secret previously stored in the Key Vault.

const getResult = await client.getSecret(secretName);
console.log("getResult: ", getResult);

List all versions of a secret

listSecretVersions will list versions of the given secret.

for await (let version of client.listSecretVersions(secretName)) {
  console.log("version: ", version);
}

List all secrets

listSecrets will list all secrets in the Key Vault.

for await (let listedSecret of client.listSecrets()) {
  console.log("secret: ", listedSecret);
}

Update the attributes of a secret

updateSecretAttributes updates the attributes of a secret.

const result = getSecret(secretName);
await client.updateSecretAttributes(secretName, result.version, { enabled: false });

Delete a secret

deleteSecret deletes a secret previously stored in the Key Vault. When soft-delete is not enabled for the Key Vault, this operation permanently deletes the deletes.

await client.deleteSecret(secretName);

Troubleshooting

Enable logs

You can set the following environment variable to get the debug logs when using this library.

• Getting debug logs from the KeyVault Secrets SDK

export DEBUG=azure*

• Getting debug logs from the KeyVault Secrets SDK and the protocol level library.

export DEBUG=azure*,rhea*

• If you are not interested in viewing the event transformation (which consumes lot of console/disk space) then you can set the DEBUG environment variable as follows:

export DEBUG=azure*,rhea*,-rhea:raw,-rhea:message,-azure:amqp-common:datatransformer

• If you are interested only in errors, then you can set the DEBUG environment variable as follows:

export DEBUG=azure:keyvault-secrets:error,azure-amqp-common:error,rhea-promise:error,rhea:events,rhea:frames,rhea:io,rhea:flow

Logging to a file

• Set the DEBUG environment variable as shown above and then run your test script as follows:
  • Logging statements from your test script go to out.log and logging statements from the sdk go to debug.log.

    node your-test-script.js > out.log 2>debug.log

  • Logging statements from your test script and the sdk go to the same file out.log by redirecting stderr to stdout (&1), and then redirect stdout to a file:

    node your-test-script.js >out.log 2>&1

  • Logging statements from your test script and the sdk go to the same file out.log.

      node your-test-script.js &> out.log

Next steps

Please take a look at the samples directory for detailed examples on how to use this library.

• helloWorld.ts - Create, read, update, and delete secrets
• listOperations.ts - List secrets all at once, list by page, and list versions of a secret.
• backupAndRestore.ts - Backup a secret and restore it after it has been deleted.
• deleteAndRecover.ts - Deletes a secret and recovers it after. Note: this assumes soft-delete is enabled for the key vault.

Contributing

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.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.