Store secrets in Postman Vault

Use Postman Vault to securely work with sensitive data, such as API keys and passwords, as vault secrets in your HTTP requests and collections. Postman Vault offers several different vault types, including Postman Local Vault and Postman Shared Vault, both of which provide secure, encrypted storage for your sensitive data.

You can also connect your own local vault, or your workspace’s shared vault, to external vaults. This allows you to reference managed secrets without storing them in Postman.

About Postman Vault

Postman Vault includes the following features:

• Postman Local Vault - Store sensitive data as vault secrets in your local instance of Postman. Only you can access vault secrets in your Postman Local Vault, and they aren’t synced to the Postman Cloud. With your local vault, your vault secrets are restricted to the Postman app and machine where you created them. Postman Local Vault is available on all Postman plans. Learn how to access your local vault.

• Postman Shared Vault - Store sensitive data as vault secrets in the Postman Cloud. Each workspace has a shared vault, and each secret in it has an access scope that controls who on your team can use it. With your shared vault, you can share vault secrets with your team members across Postman apps and machines. Postman Shared Vault is available on Postman Solo, Team, and Enterprise plans. Learn how to access your shared vault.

• Vault integrations - Connect your local vault or your workspace’s shared vault to an external vault, such as Azure Key Vault or HashiCorp Vault, so Postman references each secret without storing its value. See Integrate with external vaults to learn more.

Integrate with external vaults

Connect Postman Vault to an external vault your team already runs. Postman stores only a reference to each secret and fetches the value when you use it, so the value stays in your provider. Both kinds of integration are available on Postman Enterprise plans with the Advanced Security Administration add-on.

• Local Vault integrations - Link secrets in your own Postman Local Vault to an external vault. Each member sets up their own integration, and secrets resolve on their device, so this works for requests you send from the Postman desktop app. Postman supports 1Password, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and HashiCorp Vault. Learn more about Local Vault integrations.

• Shared Vault integrations - Link keys in your workspace’s Postman Shared Vault to an external vault. An Admin, Super Admin, or Security Manager sets up a connection for the team. The shared vault is cloud-based, so a machine authentication method can resolve secrets in the Postman Cloud. This lets monitors, scheduled collection runs, deployed flows, and CI/CD pipelines that use the Postman CLI pull secrets from your external vault, not just the requests you send yourself. Postman supports Azure Key Vault and HashiCorp Vault. Learn more about Shared Vault integrations.

Create and use vault secrets

You can add sensitive data directly to your local vault and shared vault, or set existing data in your requests and collections as vault secrets. You can also try out vault secrets locally in your requests before adding them.

Once you add vault secrets to Postman Vault, you can reference them in your requests and collections. You can reference vault secrets from your local vault throughout workspaces in your team. A shared vault secret is available to your teammates only when it’s shared with them. Teammates who need a secret that isn’t shared with them can request access to it.

To learn more, see Create and manage vault secrets in Postman Vault.

Export and import vault secrets

From your local vault, you can export vault secrets as a JSON file in encrypted or plaintext format to save them for later. This enables you to preserve vault secrets when you sign out of Postman, switch between the Postman desktop and web apps, or switch to a different machine. You can import vault secrets back to your local vault to continue using them in Postman.

To learn more, see Export and import vault secrets from your Postman Local Vault.

Troubleshoot vault secrets

To learn how to troubleshoot vault secrets in Postman Vault, see Troubleshoot vault secrets.