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Quickstart: Set and retrieve a key from Azure Key Vault using Azure PowerShell

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In this quickstart, you create a key vault in Azure Key Vault with Azure PowerShell. Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that works as a secure secrets store. You can securely store keys, passwords, certificates, and other secrets. For more information on Key Vault, review the Overview. Azure PowerShell is used to create and manage Azure resources using commands or scripts. Once that you've completed that, you will store a key.

Prerequisites

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Create a resource group

A resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed. Use the Azure PowerShell New-AzResourceGroup cmdlet to create a resource group named myResourceGroup in the eastus location.

New-AzResourceGroup -Name "myResourceGroup" -Location "EastUS"

Create a key vault

Use the Azure PowerShell New-AzKeyVault cmdlet to create a Key Vault in the resource group from the previous step. You need to provide some information:

  • Key vault name: A string of 3 to 24 characters that can contain only numbers (0-9), letters (a-z, A-Z), and hyphens (-)

    Important

    Each key vault must have a unique name. Replace <your-unique-keyvault-name> with the name of your key vault in the following examples.

  • Resource group name: myResourceGroup.

  • The location: EastUS.

New-AzKeyVault -Name "<your-unique-keyvault-name>" -ResourceGroupName "myResourceGroup" -Location "EastUS"

The output of this cmdlet shows properties of the newly created key vault. Take note of these two properties:

  • Vault Name: The name you provided to the -Name parameter.
  • Vault URI: In the example, this URI is https://<your-unique-keyvault-name>.vault.azure.net/. Applications that use your vault through its REST API must use this URI.

At this point, your Azure account is the only one authorized to perform any operations on this new vault.

Give your user account permissions to manage keys in Key Vault

To gain permissions to your key vault through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), assign a role to your "User Principal Name" (UPN) using the Azure PowerShell cmdlet New-AzRoleAssignment.

New-AzRoleAssignment -SignInName "<upn>" -RoleDefinitionName "Key Vault Crypto Officer" -Scope "/subscriptions/<subscription-id>/resourceGroups/<resource-group-name>/providers/Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults/<your-unique-keyvault-name>"

Replace <upn>, <subscription-id>, <resource-group-name> and <your-unique-keyvault-name> with your actual values. Your UPN will typically be in the format of an email address (e.g., [email protected]).

Add a key to Key Vault

To add a key to the vault, you just need to take a couple of additional steps. This key could be used by an application.

Type this command to create a called ExampleKey :

Add-AzKeyVaultKey -VaultName "<your-unique-keyvault-name>" -Name "ExampleKey" -Destination "Software"

You can now reference this key that you added to Azure Key Vault by using its URI. Use https://<your-unique-keyvault-name>.vault.azure.net/keys/ExampleKey to get the current version.

To view previously stored key:

Get-AzKeyVaultKey -VaultName "<your-unique-keyvault-name>" -KeyName "ExampleKey"

Now, you've created a Key Vault, stored a key, and retrieved it.

Clean up resources

Other quickstarts and tutorials in this collection build upon this quickstart. If you plan to continue on to work with other quickstarts and tutorials, you may want to leave these resources in place.

When no longer needed, you can use the Azure PowerShell Remove-AzResourceGroup cmdlet to remove the resource group and all related resources.

Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name "myResourceGroup"

Next steps

In this quickstart, you created a Key Vault and stored a certificate in it. To learn more about Key Vault and how to integrate it with your applications, continue on to these articles.