»HTTP API
The Vault HTTP API gives you full access to Vault via HTTP. Every aspect of Vault can be controlled via this API. The Vault CLI uses the HTTP API to access Vault.
All API routes are prefixed with /v1/.
This documentation is only for the v1 API, which is currently the only version.
Backwards compatibility: At the current version, Vault does not yet
promise backwards compatibility even with the v1 prefix. We'll remove this
warning when this policy changes. At this point in time the core API (that
is, sys/ routes) change very infrequently, but various secrets engines/auth
methods/etc. sometimes have minor changes to accommodate new features as
they're developed.
»Transport
The API is expected to be accessed over a TLS connection at all times, with a valid certificate that is verified by a well-behaved client. It is possible to disable TLS verification for listeners, however, so API clients should expect to have to do both depending on user settings.
»Authentication
Once Vault is unsealed, almost every other operation requires a client token.
A user may have a client token sent to them. The client token must be sent as
either the X-Vault-Token HTTP Header or as Authorization HTTP Header using
the Bearer <token> scheme.
Otherwise, a client token can be retrieved via authentication backends.
Each auth method has one or more unauthenticated login endpoints. These endpoints can be reached without any authentication, and are used for authentication to Vault itself. These endpoints are specific to each auth method.
Responses from auth login methods that generate an authentication token are
sent back to the client via JSON. The resulting token should be saved on the
client or passed via the X-Vault-Token or Authorization header for future requests.
»Namespaces
If using the Namespaces feature, API
operations are relative to the namespace value passed in via the
X-Vault-Namespace header. For instance, if the request path is to
secret/foo, and the header is set to ns1/ns2/, the final request path Vault
uses will be ns1/ns2/secret/foo. Note that it is semantically equivalent to
use a full path rather than the X-Vault-Namespace header, as the operation in
Vault will always look up the correct namespace based on the final given path.
Thus, it would be equivalent to the above example to set X-Vault-Namespace to
ns1/ and a request path of ns2/secret/foo, or to not set
X-Vault-Namespace at all and use a request path of ns1/ns2/secret/foo.
For example, the following two commands result in equivalent requests:
»API Operations
With few documented exceptions, all request body data and response data from
Vault is via JSON. Vault will set the Content-Type header appropriately but
does not require that clients set it.
Different plugins implement different APIs according to their functionality.
The examples below are created with the KVv1 backend, which acts like a very
simple Key/Value store. Read the documentation for a particular backend for
detailed information on its API; this simply provides a general overview.
For KVv1, reading a secret via the HTTP API is done by issuing a GET:
This maps to secret/foo where foo is the key in the secret/ mount, which
is mounted by default on a fresh Vault install and is of type kv.
Here is an example of reading a secret using cURL:
A few endpoints consume query parameters via GET calls, but only if those
parameters are not sensitive, as some load balancers will log these. Most
endpoints that consume parameters use POST instead and put the parameters in
the request body.
You can list secrets as well. To do this, either issue a GET with the query
parameter list=true, or you can use the LIST HTTP verb. For the kv
backend, listing is allowed on directories only, and returns the keys in the
given directory:
The API documentation uses LIST as the HTTP verb, but you can still use GET
with the ?list=true query string.
To use an API that consumes data via request body, issue a POST or PUT:
with a JSON body like:
Here is an example of writing a secret using cURL:
Vault currently considers PUT and POST to be synonyms. Rather than trust a
client's stated intentions, Vault backends can implement an existence check to
discover whether an operation is actually a create or update operation based on
the data already stored within Vault. This makes permission management via ACLs
more flexible.
For more examples, please look at the Vault API client.
»The X-Vault-Request Header
Requests that are sent to a Vault Agent that is configured to use the
require_request_header option must include the X-Vault-Request header
entry, e.g.:
The Vault CLI always adds this header to every request, regardless of whether the request is being sent to a Vault Agent or directly to a Vault Server. In addition, the Vault SDK always adds this header to every request.
»Help
To retrieve the help for any API within Vault, including mounted backends, auth
methods, etc. then append ?help=1 to any URL. If you have valid permission to
access the path, then the help text will be return a markdown-formatted block in the help attribute of the response.
Additionally, with the OpenAPI generation in Vault, you will get back a small
OpenAPI document in the openapi attribute. This document is relevant for the path you're looking up and any paths under it - also note paths in the OpenAPI document are relative to the initial path queried.
Example request:
Example response:
»Error Response
A common JSON structure is always returned to return errors:
This structure will be sent down for any HTTP status greater than or equal to 400.
»HTTP Status Codes
The following HTTP status codes are used throughout the API. Vault tries to adhere to these whenever possible, but in some cases may not -- feel free to file a bug in that case to point our attention to it!
Note: Applications should be prepared to accept both 200 and 204 as
success. 204 is simply an indication that there is no response body to parse,
but API endpoints that indicate that they return a 204 may return a 200 if
warnings are generated during the operation.
200- Success with data.204- Success, no data returned.400- Invalid request, missing or invalid data.403- Forbidden, your authentication details are either incorrect, you don't have access to this feature, or - if CORS is enabled - you made a cross-origin request from an origin that is not allowed to make such requests.404- Invalid path. This can both mean that the path truly doesn't exist or that you don't have permission to view a specific path. We use 404 in some cases to avoid state leakage.429- Default return code for health status of standby nodes. This will likely change in the future.473- Default return code for health status of performance standby nodes.500- Internal server error. An internal error has occurred, try again later. If the error persists, report a bug.502- A request to Vault required Vault making a request to a third party; the third party responded with an error of some kind.503- Vault is down for maintenance or is currently sealed. Try again later.
»Limits
A maximum request size of 32MB is imposed to prevent a denial of service attack
with arbitrarily large requests; this can be tuned per listener block in
Vault's server configuration file.
