HashiCorp Vault — Installation & Setup

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This chapter walks you through installing Vault on every major platform, running a dev server for learning, configuring a production server, choosing a storage backend, and navigating the UI and CLI.

What’s in This Chapter?

# Topic Description
1 Install Vault Binary, Homebrew, apt/yum, Docker installation
2 Dev Server Start a dev server, explore the environment
3 Production Server vault.hcl config, init, unseal, systemd
4 Storage Backends Raft, Consul, filesystem, cloud storage
5 Vault UI & CLI Navigate the web UI, master the CLI
6 Practice Exercises 5 hands-on exercises

Prerequisites

Before installing, make sure you have:

  • A Linux, macOS, or Windows machine
  • Terminal / shell access
  • Docker installed (optional, but recommended for labs)
  • curl and jq installed (for API examples)

Quick Start

If you just want to get started immediately:

# macOS
brew install vault

# Start dev server
vault server -dev -dev-root-token-id="my-root-token"

# In another terminal
export VAULT_ADDR='http://127.0.0.1:8200'
export VAULT_TOKEN='my-root-token'
vault status

Chapter Flow

Start with Install Vault to get Vault on your machine, then spin up a Dev Server to start experimenting.

Next: Install Vault

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