This section will be relatively short so that we can focus on the actual use of Vault. If your organization already has an instance of vault running, feel free to skip these steps. However, being able to see how everything fits together by using a local instance may make understanding the software easier.
We will add the hashicorp repo to our repositories and then install the chart with dev mode enabled.
helm repo add hashicorp https://helm.releases.hashicorp.com
helm install vault hashicorp/vault \
--set "server.dev.enabled=true"
Now, wait until the deployment is running. We can check this by running the following command:
kubectl get pods
# Keep running this command until you see something similar to this:
# NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
# [...]
# vault-agent-injector-7d8b64b8d4-cvztt 1/1 Running 0 15s
# vault-0 1/1 Running 0 15s
# [...]
Because we are running in dev mode, we will have access to a web interface by default. However, we need to port forward it first. We can do this by running the following command.
kubectl port-forward pods/vault-0 8200:8200 8201:8201
We should now have access to the dev interface at http://localhost:8200/ui/
. Log into the vault using the token root
and take the tour to get an idea of how the Vault user interface is structured. The important parts for users are "Secrets" and "Tools", but the others are also interesting.