The environment variable vault is built into Kong Gateway and doesn’t require any external services. You can store secrets as environment variables on the data plane and reference them in any field that supports Vault references.
You can set up an environment variable vault in one of the following ways:
- Using the Vault entity
- Using environment variables, set at Kong Gateway startup
- Using parameters in
kong.conf, set at Kong Gateway startup
The Vault entity can only be used once the database is initialized. Secrets for values that are used before the database is initialized can’t make use of the Vaults entity.