Quickstart: Create a key vault using the Azure CLI

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides a secure store for keys, secrets, and certificates. For more information on Key Vault, see About Azure Key Vault; for more information on what can be stored in a key vault, see About keys, secrets, and certificates.

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

Prerequisites

You can use the local Azure CLI.

  • This quickstart requires version 2.0.4 or later of the Azure CLI.

Create a resource group

A resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed. Use the az group create command to create a resource group named myResourceGroup in the chinaeast location.

az group create --name "myResourceGroup" -l "ChinaNorth"

Create a key vault

Use the Azure CLI az keyvault create command to create a Key Vault in the resource group from the previous step. You will 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 with the name of your key vault in the following examples.

  • Resource group name: myResourceGroup.

  • The location: ChinaNorth.

az keyvault create --name "<your-unique-keyvault-name>" --resource-group "myResourceGroup" --location "ChinaNorth"

The output of this command shows properties of the newly created key vault. Take note of the two properties listed below:

  • Vault Name: The name you provided to the --name parameter above.
  • Vault URI: In the example, this is https://<your-unique-keyvault-name>.vault.azure.cn/. 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.

Clean up resources

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

When no longer needed, you can use the Azure CLI az group delete command to remove the resource group and all related resources:

az group delete --name "myResourceGroup"

Next steps

In this quickstart you created a Key Vault and deleted it. To learn more about Key Vault and how to integrate it with your applications, continue on to the articles below.