As of 9/18/23 this project is now deprecated and no longer maintained; we recommend using HashiCorp Vault as a more robust and actively supported alternative.

Keywhiz is a system for distributing and managing secrets. For more information, see the website.

Our Protecting infrastructure secrets with Keywhiz blog post is worth reading, as it provides some useful context.

Keywhiz requires Java 11 and MySQL 5.7 or higher.

See CONTRIBUTING for details on submitting patches.

Build Keywhiz:

mvn install

Run Keywhiz:

java -jar server/target/keywhiz-server-*-shaded.jar [COMMAND] [OPTIONS]

Useful commands to get started are migrate, add-user and server. Use with --help for a list of all available commands. Use with [COMMAND] --help to get help on a particular command.

For example, to run Keywhiz with a mysql database in development mode:

SERVER_JAR="server/target/keywhiz-server-*-shaded.jar"
KEYWHIZ_CONFIG="server/target/classes/keywhiz-development.yaml"

# Initialize dev database
java -jar $SERVER_JAR migrate $KEYWHIZ_CONFIG

# Add an administrative user
java -jar $SERVER_JAR add-user $KEYWHIZ_CONFIG

# Run server
java -jar $SERVER_JAR server $KEYWHIZ_CONFIG

To connect to a running Keywhiz instance, you will need to use the CLI.

An example helper shell script that wraps the keywhiz-cli and sets some default parameters:

#!/bin/sh

# Set the path to a compiled, shaded keywhiz-cli JAR file
KEYWHIZ_CLI_JAR="/path/to/keywhiz-cli-shaded.jar"
KEYWHIZ_SERVER_URL="https://$(hostname):4444"

# Use these flags if you want to specify a non-standard CA trust store.
# Alternatively, in development and testing specify the --devTrustStore 
# flag to use the default truststore (DO NOT use this in production, as
# the truststore is checked into Keywhiz' code).
TRUSTSTORE="-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=/path/to/ca-bundle.jceks"
TRUSTTYPE="-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=JCEKS"

java "$TRUSTSTORE" "$TRUSTTYPE" -jar "$KEYWHIZ_CLI_JAR" -U "$KEYWHIZ_SERVER_URL" "$@"

Keywhiz uses jOOQ to talk to its database.

If you made changes to the database model and want to regenerate sources:

mvn install -pl model/ -Pgenerate-jooq-sources

We recommend IntelliJ IDEA for development.

To enable auto-completion, code navigation, etc., open the keywhiz repository in IDEA, right click pom.xml in the repository root, and select "Add as Maven Project".

Square also maintains a Keywhiz client implementation called Keysync.

We ship a Dockerfile for building a Docker container for Keywhiz. Please see the Dockerfile for extra instructions.

Keywhiz is under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.