Azure KeyVault Administration client library for Python

Azure Key Vault helps solve the following problems:

• Vault administration (this library) - role-based access control (RBAC), and vault-level backup and restore options
• Cryptographic key management (azure-keyvault-keys) - create, store, and control access to the keys used to encrypt your data
• Secrets management (azure-keyvault-secrets) - securely store and control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets
• Certificate management (azure-keyvault-certificates) - create, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates

Getting started

Install packages

Install azure-keyvault-administration and azure-identity with pip:

pip install azure-keyvault-administration azure-identity

azure-identity is used for Azure Active Directory authentication as demonstrated below.

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription
• Python 2.7, 3.5.3, or later
• A Key Vault. If you need to create one, See the final two steps in the next section for details on creating the Key Vault with the Azure CLI.

Authenticate the client

This document demonstrates using DefaultAzureCredential to authenticate as a service principal. However, this package's clients accept any azure-identity credential. See the azure-identity documentation for more information about other credentials.

Create and Get credentials

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://your-application-name --skip-assignment
  

  Output:

  {
      "appId": "generated app id",
      "displayName": "your-application-name",
      "name": "http://your-application-name",
      "password": "random password",
      "tenant": "tenant id"
  }
  

• Take note of the service principal objectId

  az ad sp show --id <appId> --query objectId
  

  Output:

  "<your-service-principal-object-id>"
  

• Use the output to set AZURE_CLIENT_ID ("appId" above), AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET ("password" above) and AZURE_TENANT_ID ("tenant" above) 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"
  

• Create the Key Vault and grant the above mentioned application authorization to perform administrative operations on the Azure Key Vault (replace <your-resource-group-name> and <your-key-vault-name> with your own, unique names and <your-service-principal-object-id> with the value from above):

  az keyvault create --hsm-name <your-key-vault-name> --resource-group <your-resource-group-name> --administrators <your-service-principal-object-id> --location <your-azure-location>
  

• Use the above mentioned Azure Key Vault name to retrieve details of your Vault which also contains your Azure Key Vault URL:

  az keyvault show --hsm-name <your-key-vault-name>
  

Create a client

Once the AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET and AZURE_TENANT_ID environment variables are set, DefaultAzureCredential will be able to authenticate the clients.

There are two clients available in this package, below are snippets demonstrating how to construct each one of these clients. Constructing a client also requires your vault's URL, which you can get from the Azure CLI or the Azure Portal. In the Azure Portal, this URL is the vault's "DNS Name".

Create a KeyVaultAccessControlClient

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultAccessControlClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

client = KeyVaultAccessControlClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

Create a KeyVaultBackupClient

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultBackupClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

client = KeyVaultBackupClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

Key concepts

Role Definition

A role definition defines the operations that can be performed, such as read, write, and delete. It can also define the operations that are excluded from allowed operations.

A role definition is specified as part of a role assignment.

Role Assignment.

A role assignment is the association of a role definition to a service principal. They can be created, listed, fetched individually, and deleted.

KeyVaultAccessControlClient

A KeyVaultAccessControlClient manages role definitions and role assignments.

KeyVaultBackupClient

A KeyVaultBackupClient performs full key backups, full key restores, and selective key restores.

Examples

This section conntains code snippets covering common tasks:

• Access Control
  • List all role definitions
  • List all role assignments
  • Create, Get, and Delete a role assignment
• Backup and Restore
  • Perform a full key backup
  • Perform a full key restore

List all role definitions

List the role definitions available for assignment.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultAccessControlClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

client = KeyVaultAccessControlClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

# this is the global scope. This will list all role definitions available for assignment
role_definitions = client.list_role_definitions(role_scope=KeyVaultRoleScope.global_value)

for role_definition in role_definitions:
    print(role_definition.id)
    print(role_definition.role_name)
    print(role_definition.description)

List all role assignments

Before creating a new role assignment in the next snippet, list all of the current role assignments

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultAccessControlClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

client = KeyVaultAccessControlClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

# this is the global scope. This will list all role assignments available for assignment
role_assignments = client.list_role_assignments(role_scope=KeyVaultRoleScope.global_value)

for role_assignment in role_assignments:
    print(role_assignment.name)
    print(role_assignment.principal_id)
    print(role_assignment.role_definition_id)

Create, Get, and Delete a role assignment

Assign a role to a service principal. This will require a role definition id from the list retrieved in the above snippet and the principal object id retrieved in the Create and Get credentials

import uuid
from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultAccessControlClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

client = KeyVaultAccessControlClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

role_scope = "/"  # setting the scope to the global scope
role_assignment_name = uuid.uuid4()
role_definition_id = "<role-definition-id>"  # Replace <role-definition-id> with the id of a definition returned from the previous example
principal_id = "<your-service-principal-object-id>"

# first, let's create the role assignment
role_assignment = client.create_role_assignment(role_scope, role_assignment_name, role_definition_id, principal_id)
print(role_assignment.name)
print(role_assignment.principal_id)
print(role_assignment.role_definition_id)

# now, we get it
role_assignment = client.get_role_assignment(role_scope, role_assignment.name)
print(role_assignment.name)
print(role_assignment.principal_id)
print(role_assignment.role_definition_id)

# finally, we delete this role assignment
role_assignment = client.delete_role_assignment(role_scope, role_assignment.name)
print(role_assignment.name)
print(role_assignment.principal_id)
print(role_assignment.role_definition_id)

Perform a full key backup

Back up your entire collection of keys. The backing store for full key backups is a blob storage container using Shared Access Signature authentication.

For more details on creating a SAS token using the BlobServiceClient, see the sample here. Alternatively, it is possible to generate a SAS token in Storage Explorer

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultBackupClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
client = KeyVaultBackupClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

blob_storage_uri = "<your-blob-storage-uri>"  # the URI to your storage account. Should contain the name of the specific container
sas_token = "<your-sas-token>"  # replace with the sas token to your storage account. See this snippet's description on help to retrieve

# performing a full key backup is a long-running operation. Calling `result()` on the poller will wait
# until the backup is completed, then return an object representing the backup operation.
backup_operation = client.begin_full_backup(blob_storage_uri, sas_token).result()

# this is the URI of the Azure blob storage container which contains the backup
azure_storage_blob_container_uri = backup_operation.azure_storage_blob_container_uri

print(backup_operation.status)
print(backup_operation.job_id)
print(azure_storage_blob_container_uri)

Perform a full key restore

Restore your entire collection of keys from a backup. The data source for a full key restore is a storage blob accessed using Shared Access Signature authentication. You will also need the azure_storage_blob_container_uri from the above snippet.

For more details on creating a SAS token using the BlobServiceClient, see the sample here. Alternatively, it is possible to generate a SAS token in Storage Explorer

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultBackupClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
client = KeyVaultBackupClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

blob_storage_uri = "<your-blob-storage-uri>"  # the URI to your storage account. Should contain the name of the specific container
sas_token = "<your-sas-token>"  # replace with the sas token to your storage account. See this snippet's description on help to retrieve

# Replace <azure-storage-blob-container-uri> with the blob storage container returned in the previous example
azure_storage_blob_container_uri = "<azure-storage-blob-container-uri>"
folder_name = azure_storage_blob_container_uri.split("/")[-1]

# performing a full key restore is a long-running operation. Calling `result()` on the poller will wait
# until the restore is completed, then return an object representing the restore operation.
restore_operation = client.begin_full_restore(blob_storage_uri, sas_token, folder_name).result()

print(restore_operation.status)
print(restore_operation.job_id)

Troubleshooting

General

Key Vault clients raise exceptions defined in azure-core. For example, if you try to get a role assignment that doesn't exist, KeyVaultAccessControlClient raises ResourceNotFoundError:

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.administration import KeyVaultAccessControlClient
from azure.core.exceptions import ResourceNotFoundError

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
client = KeyVaultAccessControlClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

try:
    client.get_role_assignment("/", "which-does-not-exist")
except ResourceNotFoundError as e:
    print(e.message)

Next steps

Content forthcoming

Additional Documentation

For more extensive documentation on Azure Key Vault, see the API reference documentation.

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.

Release History

4.0.0b1 (2020-09-08)

Added

• KeyVaultAccessControlClient performs role-based access control operations
• KeyVaultBackupClient performs full vault backup and full and selective restore operations