Install the Vault binary

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Vault
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You must first install Vault on your computer before you can use it. Vault is available as source code, as a pre-compiled binary, or in packaged formats.

This page will not cover how to compile Vault from source, but compiling from source is covered in the documentation for those who want to be sure they're compiling source they trust into the binary.

Install Vault

Note

To use Homebrew with macOS, you need to have Command Line Tools (CLT) for Xcode installed as described in the Homebrew installation documentation. If you encounter an error like xcrun: error: invalid active developer path when following these steps, ensure that you have installed the latest CLT for Xcode and try again.

Homebrew is a free and open-source package management system for Mac OS X. Install the official Vault formula from the terminal.

Install the HashiCorp tap, a repository of all our Homebrew packages.

$ brew tap hashicorp/tap

Install Vault with hashicorp/tap/vault.

$ brew install hashicorp/tap/vault

Note

This installs a signed binary and is automatically updated with every new official release.

To update to the latest, run

$ brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/vault

Vault Enterprise

To install Vault Enterprise, you will need a license to run it. Your customer support contact can generate a trial license for any HashiCorp enterprise product. If you are an existing HashiCorp enterprise customer, you may contact your organization's customer success manager (CSM) for information on how to get your organization's enterprise license.

After you have a license, run the following command:

$ brew install hashicorp/tap/vault-enterprise

Other operating systems

If you need to Install Vault on another operating system, please see the following:

Verifying the installation

After installing Vault, verify the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and checking that the vault binary is available. By executing vault, you should see help output similar to the following:

$ vault
Usage: vault <command> [args]

Common commands:
    read        Read data and retrieves secrets
    write       Write data, configuration, and secrets
    delete      Delete secrets and configuration
    list        List data or secrets
    login       Authenticate locally
    agent       Start a Vault agent
    server      Start a Vault server
    status      Print seal and HA status
    unwrap      Unwrap a wrapped secret

Other commands:
    audit          Interact with audit devices
    auth           Interact with auth methods
    debug          Runs the debug command
    kv             Interact with Vault's Key-Value storage
    lease          Interact with leases
    monitor        Stream log messages from a Vault server
    namespace      Interact with namespaces
    operator       Perform operator-specific tasks
    path-help      Retrieve API help for paths
    plugin         Interact with Vault plugins and catalog
    policy         Interact with policies
    print          Prints runtime configurations
    secrets        Interact with secrets engines
    ssh            Initiate an SSH session
    token          Interact with tokens

If you get an error that the binary could not be found, then your PATH environment variable might no be properly set. Please go back and ensure that your PATH variable contains the directory where Vault was installed.

Otherwise, Vault is installed and ready to go.

Summary

Vault is available to install for most operating systems and through common software distribution tools such as apt and yum. In addition to the pre-compiled binaries, you can also review the Vault source code and compile your own binary.

Discover Vault plugins

Set up Vault