---
layout: "intro"
page_title: "Your First Secret - Getting Started"
sidebar_current: "gettingstarted-firstsecret"
description: |-
  With the Vault server running, let's read and write our first secret.
---

# Your First Secret

Now that the dev server is up and running, let's get straight to it and
read and write our first secret.

One of the core features of Vault is the ability to read and write
arbitrary secrets securely. On this page, we'll do this using the CLI,
but there is also a complete
[HTTP API](/api/index.html)
that can be used to programmatically do anything with Vault.

Secrets written to Vault are encrypted and then written to backend
storage. For our dev server, backend storage is in-memory, but in production
this would more likely be on disk or in [Consul](https://www.consul.io).
Vault encrypts the value before it is ever handed to the storage driver.
The backend storage mechanism _never_ sees the unencrypted value and doesn't
have the means necessary to decrypt it without Vault.

## Writing a Secret

Let's start by writing a secret. This is done very simply with the
`vault kv` command, as shown below:

```text
$ vault kv put secret/hello foo=world
Success! Data written to: secret/hello
```

This writes the pair `foo=world` to the path `secret/hello`. We'll
cover paths in more detail later, but for now it is important that the
path is prefixed with `secret/`, otherwise this example won't work. The
`secret/` prefix is where arbitrary secrets can be read and written.

You can even write multiple pieces of data, if you want:

```text
$ vault kv put secret/hello foo=world excited=yes
Success! Data written to: secret/hello
```

`vault kv put` is a very powerful command. In addition to writing data
directly from the command-line, it can read values and key pairs from
`STDIN` as well as files. For more information, see the
[command documentation](/docs/commands/index.html).

~> **Warning:** The documentation uses the `key=value` based entry
throughout, but it is more secure to use files if possible. Sending
data via the CLI is often logged in shell history. For real secrets,
please use files. See the link above about reading in from `STDIN` for more information.

## Getting a Secret

As you might expect, secrets can be gotten with `vault get`:

```text
$ vault kv get secret/hello
Key                 Value
---                 -----
refresh_interval    768h
excited             yes
foo                world
```

As you can see, the values we wrote are given back to us. Vault gets
the data from storage and decrypts it.

The output format is purposefully whitespace separated to make it easy
to pipe into a tool like `awk`.

This contains some extra information. Many secrets engines create leases for
secrets that allow time-limited access to other systems, and in those cases
`lease_id` would contain a lease identifier and `lease_duration` would contain
the length of time for which the lease is valid, in seconds.

Optional JSON output is very useful for scripts. For example below we use the
`jq` tool to extract the value of the `excited` secret:

```text
$ vault kv get -format=json secret/hello | jq -r .data.data.excited
yes
```

When supported, you can also get a field directly:

```text
$ vault kv get -field=excited secret/hello
yes
```

## Deleting a Secret

Now that we've learned how to read and write a secret, let's go ahead
and delete it. We can do this with `vault delete`:

```text
$ vault kv delete secret/hello
Success! Data deleted (if it existed) at: secret/hello
```

## Next

In this section we learned how to use the powerful CRUD features of
Vault to store arbitrary secrets. On its own this is already a useful
but basic feature.

Next, we'll learn the basics about [secrets engines](/intro/getting-started/secrets-engines.html).
