Azure Key Vault Secret client library for Python

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

Getting started

Install the package

Install the Azure Key Vault client library for Python with pip:

pip install azure-keyvault-secrets

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription.

• Python 2.7, 3.4 or later to use this package.

• 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>
  

Authenticate the client

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.

Create/Get credentials

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 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"
  

• 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>
  

Create Secret client

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)

Key concepts

Secret

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.

Secret Client:

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.

Examples

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

Create a Secret

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)

Retrieve a Secret

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 an existing Secret

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.value)
    print(updated_secret.version)
    print(updated_secret.updated)
    print(updated_secret.content_type)
    print(updated_secret.tags)

Delete a Secret

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.

    secret = secret_client.delete_secret("secret-name")

    print(deleted_secret.name)
    print(deleted_secret.deleted_date)

List secrets

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)

Async operations

Python’s asyncio package and its two keywords async and await serves to declare, build, execute, and manage asynchronous code. The package supports async API on Python 3.5+ and is identical to synchronous API.

The following examples provide code snippets for performing async operations in the Secret Client library:

Async create a secret

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)

Async list secrets

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)

Troubleshooting

General

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"

Logging

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)

Next steps

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_examples_secrets.py and test_examples_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

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 (2019-06-28)

For release notes and more information please visit https://aka.ms/azure-sdk-preview1-python