HashiCorp Vault Has a Free Secrets Management Tool

HashiCorp Vault is a free, open-source secrets management tool that provides secure storage, dynamic secrets, encryption as a service, and identity-based access.

What Is Vault?

Vault centralizes secret management — API keys, passwords, certificates, encryption keys — all behind a unified API.

Key features:

• Secure secret storage
• Dynamic secrets (auto-generated, auto-revoked)
• Encryption as a service
• Leasing and renewal
• Revocation
• Identity-based access (policies)
• Audit logging
• Multiple auth methods
• Multiple storage backends

Quick Start

# Dev mode (for testing)
vault server -dev

# Production (with file backend)
vault server -config=vault.hcl

Docker:

docker run -d --cap-add=IPC_LOCK \
  -p 8200:8200 \
  -e VAULT_DEV_ROOT_TOKEN_ID=myroot \
  hashicorp/vault

Store and Retrieve Secrets

# Store
vault kv put secret/myapp/config \
  db_password=supersecret \
  api_key=abc123

# Retrieve
vault kv get secret/myapp/config

API Access

curl -H "X-Vault-Token: myroot" \
  http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/secret/data/myapp/config

Dynamic Secrets

Vault can generate database credentials on-the-fly:

# Configure database
vault write database/config/postgres \
  plugin_name=postgresql-database-plugin \
  connection_url="postgresql://admin:pass@db:5432/mydb"

# Get temporary credentials (auto-expire)
vault read database/creds/my-role
# Returns: username=v-token-my-role-abc123, password=randomly-generated

Credentials auto-expire. No more shared passwords.

Vault vs Alternatives

Feature	Vault	AWS Secrets Manager	Infisical
Self-host	Yes	No	Yes
Dynamic secrets	Yes	Rotation only	No
Encryption as service	Yes	KMS	No
PKI (certificates)	Yes	ACM	No
Free	OSS version	$0.40/secret/mo	Self-host

With 31K+ GitHub stars. The gold standard for secrets.

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