Azure Key Vault Secret client library for Python

Azure Key Vault helps solve the following problems:

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

Source code | Package (PyPI) | API reference documentation | Product documentation | Samples

Getting started

Install the package

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

pip install azure-keyvault-secrets

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription

• Python 2.7, 3.5 or later

• A Key Vault. If you need to create one, you can use the Azure Cloud Shell to create one with this 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>
  

  Output:

  {
      "id": "...",
      "location": "westus2",
      "name": "<your key vault name>",
      "properties": {
          "accessPolicies": [...],
          "createMode": null,
          "enablePurgeProtection": null,
          "enableSoftDelete": null,
          "enabledForDeployment": false,
          "enabledForDiskEncryption": null,
          "enabledForTemplateDeployment": null,
          "networkAcls": null,
          "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
          "sku": { "name": "standard" },
          "tenantId": "...",
          "vaultUri": "https://<your key vault name>.vault.azure.net/"
      },
      "resourceGroup": "<your resource group name>",
      "type": "Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults"
  }
  

  The "vaultUri" property is the vault_url used by SecretClient.

Authenticate the client

In order to interact with a Key Vault's secrets, you'll need an instance of the SecretClient class. Creating one requires a vault url and credential. This document demonstrates using DefaultAzureCredential as the credential, authenticating with a service principal's client id, secret, and tenant id. Other authentication methods are supported. See the azure-identity documentation for more details.

Create a service principal

Use this Azure Cloud Shell snippet to create a service principal:

• 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": "your-application-name",
      "name": "http://your-application-name",
      "password": "random password",
      "tenant": "tenant id"
  }
  

• Use the output 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"
  

• Authorize the service principal to perform key operations in your Key Vault:

  az keyvault set-policy --name <your key vault name> --spn $AZURE_CLIENT_ID --key-permissions backup delete get list create
  

  Possible key permissions:

  • Key management: backup, delete, get, list, purge, recover, restore, create, update, import
  • Cryptographic operations: decrypt, encrypt, unwrapKey, wrapKey, verify, sign

Create a client

After setting the AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET and AZURE_TENANT_ID environment variables, you can create the SecretClient:

    from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
    from azure.keyvault.secrets import SecretClient

    credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

    secret_client = SecretClient(vault_url=<your-vault-url>, credential=credential)

Key concepts

With a SecretClient, you can get secrets from the vault, create new secrets and update their values, and delete secrets, as shown in the examples below.

Secret

A Secret consists of a secret value and its associated metadata and management information. For this library secret values are strings, but Azure Key Vault doesn't store them as such. For more information about secrets and how Key Vault stores and manages them, see the Key Vault documentation .

Examples

This section contains code snippets covering common tasks:

• Retrieve a Secret
• Update Secret metadata
• Delete a Secret
• List Secrets
• Async create a Secret
• Async list Secrets

Create a Secret

set_secret creates a Secret in the vault. If a secret with the same name already exists, a new version of that 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 Secret metadata

update_secret updates a secret's metadata. It cannot change the secret's value; use set_secret to set a secret's value.

    # 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.updated)
    print(updated_secret.content_type)
    print(updated_secret.tags)

Delete a Secret

delete_secret deletes a secret. If soft-delete is not enabled for the vault, this permanently deletes the secret.

    deleted_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 vault. The list doesn't include secret values; use get_secret to get a secret's value.

    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

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.

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

    credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
    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 example, if you try to get a key that doesn't exist in the vault, SecretClient raises ResourceNotFoundError:

from azure.core.exceptions import ResourceNotFoundError

secret_client.delete_secret("my-secret")

try:
    secret_client.get_secret("my-secret")
except ResourceNotFoundError as e:
    print(e.message)

Logging

Network trace logging is disabled by default for this library. When enabled, HTTP requests will be logged at DEBUG level using the logging library. You can configure logging to print debugging information to stdout or write it to a file:

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 to log all HTTP requests at DEBUG level
config = SecretClient.create_config(credential, logging_enable=True)
client = SecretClient(url, credential, config=config)

Network trace logging can also be enabled for any single operation:

secret = secret_client.get_secret("secret-name", logging_enable=True)

Next steps

Several samples are available in the Azure SDK for Python GitHub repository. These provide example code for additional Key Vault scenarios:

• test_samples_secrets.py and test_samples_secrets_async.py - code snippets from the library's documentation
• hello_world.py and hello_world_async.py - create/get/update/delete secrets
• list_operations.py and list_operations_async.py - list secrets

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

4.0.0b3 (2019-09-11)

This release includes only internal changes.

4.0.0b2 (2019-08-06)

Breaking changes:

• Removed azure.core.Configuration from the public API in preparation for a revamped configuration API. Static create_config methods have been renamed _create_config, and will be removed in a future release.
• This version of the library requires azure-core 1.0.0b2
  • If you later want to revert to a version requiring azure-core 1.0.0b1, of this or another Azure SDK library, you must explicitly install azure-core 1.0.0b1 as well. For example: pip install azure-core==1.0.0b1 azure-keyvault-secrets==4.0.0b1

New features:

• Distributed tracing framework OpenCensus is now supported
• Added support for HTTP challenge based authentication, allowing clients to interact with vaults in sovereign clouds.

4.0.0b1 (2019-06-28)

Version 4.0.0b1 is the first preview of our efforts to create a user-friendly and Pythonic client library for Azure Key Vault. For more information about preview releases of other Azure SDK libraries, please visit https://aka.ms/azure-sdk-preview1-python.

This library is not a direct replacement for azure-keyvault. Applications using that library would require code changes to use azure-keyvault-secrets. This package's documentation and samples demonstrate the new API.

Major changes from azure-keyvault

• Packages scoped by functionality
  • azure-keyvault-secrets contains a client for secret operations, azure-keyvault-keys contains a client for key operations
• Client instances are scoped to vaults (an instance interacts with one vault only)
• Asynchronous API supported on Python 3.5.3+
  • the azure.keyvault.secrets.aio namespace contains an async equivalent of the synchronous client in azure.keyvault.secrets
• Authentication using azure-identity credentials
  • see this package's documentation , and the Azure Identity documentation for more information

azure-keyvault features not implemented in this library

• Certificate management APIs
• National cloud support. This release supports public global cloud vaults, e.g. https://{vault-name}.vault.azure.net