Hashicorp Vault CLI Part 7: Authentication

Hashicorp Vault is a secrets management tool. For setup, configuration, and management, the Vault CLI can be used. It offers more than 30 subcommands, and in this blog series, they are explored systematically. This article focuses on Authentication. It covers the setup and management of authentication engines, and it shows how to perform logins for the engines. The technical context of this article is hashicorp_vault_v1.21.1 , released 2025-11-18. All provided information and command examples should be valid with newer versions too, baring an update of the CLI commands' syntax . The background material for this article stems from the official Hashicorp Vault documentation about Vault CLI and subsequent pages, as well as information from the binary itself . This article originally appeared at my blog admantium.com . Vault CLI Overview The Vault CLI provides more than 30 commands. For systematically explaining and contextualizing each command, they can be structured as follows. Groups ma