Composed secrets — derive a read-only
value, such as a connection string, from other secrets declared in the
manifest.
Infisical — read and write secrets in Infisical
Cloud or a self-hosted instance, with Universal Auth, access-token, and
provider-credential authentication.
C# SDK — resolve the same manifests from .NET through the
shared native resolver, distributed as the Cachix.SecretSpec NuGet package.
Applications often need a connection string while secret stores work better
with its independently rotated parts. SecretSpec can now keep those parts
separate and assemble the application-facing value when it resolves the
manifest:
DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and DB_HOST still come from their configured
providers. DATABASE_URL is assembled in memory and behaves like any other
resolved secret in the CLI and SDKs. Compositions are read-only, may build on
other compositions, and are checked for missing references and cycles before
resolution.
See Composed Secrets for optional values,
escaping, profile inheritance, and validation rules.
The new infisical:// provider works with Infisical Cloud, its EU service, and
self-hosted instances. Point SecretSpec at an Infisical project and authenticate
with Universal Auth:
Access tokens are also supported. Credentials can come from environment
variables or SecretSpec’s
provider credentials, allowing,
for example, an Infisical machine identity to be kept in the system keyring:
secretspec.toml
[providers.infisical]
uri = "infisical://app.infisical.com/7e2f1a4c-..."
[providers.infisical.credentials]
client_id = "keyring"
client_secret = "keyring"
By default, the active SecretSpec profile also names the Infisical environment.
A production profile therefore reads from the production environment,
while ?env= can select a different one. The provider supports normal
SecretSpec reads and writes, as well as references to existing Infisical
secrets and versions.
See the Infisical provider guide for self-hosting,
authentication, paths, references, and permissions.
It uses the same resolver as the CLI and other language SDKs, so profiles,
providers, fallback chains, references, generators, audit reasons, and composed
secrets work consistently in .NET. Native resolver builds are included in the
NuGet package, with no separate SecretSpec CLI installation required.
See the C# SDK guide for supported platforms, ASP.NET Core
integration, preflight reports, error handling, and typed access.
All three additions are opt-in: existing manifests and provider configurations
continue to work unchanged. Add composed when a value should be derived,
select an infisical:// provider to use Infisical, or install
Cachix.SecretSpec in a .NET application.
See the full changelog
for every change in this release.
Suppose Bitwarden Secrets Manager holds an application’s
secrets, but its machine access token is kept in the user’s
OS keyring. Declare the relationship on the provider
alias:
secretspec.toml
[providers]
keyring = "keyring://"
[providers.bws]
uri = "bws://a9230ec4-5507-4870-b8b5-b3f500587e4c"
[providers.bws.credentials]
access_token = "keyring"
Before SecretSpec connects to Bitwarden, it reads access_token from the
keyring at the normal {project}/{profile}/access_token address. The active
profile is part of that address, so production and
development can authenticate as different machines without changing the alias.
When a credential already has a provider-native address, use a ref. Here a
Vault AppRole is kept as two fields of one
1Password item:
secretspec.toml
[providers.vault_prod]
uri = "vault://secret/myapp?auth=approle"
[providers.vault_prod.credentials]
role_id.provider = "onepassword"
role_id.ref.vault = "Infra"
role_id.ref.item = "vault-approle"
role_id.ref.field = "role_id"
secret_id.provider = "onepassword"
secret_id.ref.vault = "Infra"
secret_id.ref.item = "vault-approle"
secret_id.ref.field = "secret_id"
The credential source uses the same ref coordinates
as application secrets. The difference is where the value goes: SecretSpec
hands it directly to the destination provider in memory. It is not added to the
environment of a process started by
secretspec run.
Provider credential names are semantic and checked before a source is opened.
Bitwarden accepts access_token; Vault accepts token, role_id, and
secret_id; 1Password accepts service_account_token; Azure Key Vault accepts
tenant_id, client_id, and client_secret. A configured credential is
authoritative, while a provider’s usual environment fallback remains available
when no credential source is declared.
Credential chains deliberately stop after one hop. The store containing a
provider credential cannot itself depend on another provider credential. This
keeps the bootstrap path finite and makes dependency mistakes fail before any
store is contacted.
Credentials are fetched once per invocation and profile, then reused for every
secret routed through that alias. Each credential read, and each value stored by
login, gets an audit event marked with the semantic
credential name and source store. As with every SecretSpec audit event, the
credential value is never recorded.
The default authentication mode first looks for the tenant_id, client_id,
and client_secret provider credentials introduced above, then their
AZURE_TENANT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_ID, and AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET environment
fallbacks. If none are present, it uses the signed-in Azure CLI or Azure
Developer CLI session. A partial service principal is an error, rather than a
reason to silently switch identities.
That makes a service principal straightforward to keep in the system keyring:
secretspec.toml
[providers.azure]
uri = "akv://myvault"
[providers.azure.credentials]
tenant_id = "keyring"
client_id = "keyring"
client_secret = "keyring"
Terminal window
secretspecconfigproviderloginazure
secretspecrun--providerazure--./deploy
Sovereign clouds can use either a complete vault hostname or an explicit DNS
suffix such as akv://myvault?suffix=vault.azure.cn.
Azure restricts secret names to letters, digits, and hyphens and compares them
case-insensitively. SecretSpec encodes the project, profile, and key as
lowercase, unpadded Base32 components. The encoding keeps names that differ by
case or punctuation distinct instead of letting Azure collapse them onto the
same secret. Existing Azure secrets can be addressed with a read-only ref.
The new gopass:// provider reads and writes through the
gopass CLI. Gopass builds on the Unix pass provider with
multi-user and multi-store support while keeping entries GPG-encrypted and
synchronized through git.
Once Gopass is installed and its password store is initialized, select it like
any other provider:
Terminal window
secretspecsetDATABASE_URL--providergopass
secretspecrun--providergopass--npmstart
By default, entries live under
secretspec/{project}/{profile}/{key}. A custom URI can change that layout,
including omitting {project} to share secrets between repositories:
An existing Gopass entry can also be addressed directly with a
ref, including the mount-point prefix used by a
multi-store setup. See the Gopass provider guide for
installation, shared-store configuration, references, and current limitations.
The new cachix/secretspec Composer package brings the shared resolver to PHP:
Terminal window
composerrequirecachix/secretspec
<?php
use Secretspec\SecretSpec;
$resolved=SecretSpec::builder()
->withProfile('production')
->withReason('boot web app')
->load();
echo$resolved->secrets['DATABASE_URL']->get();
$resolved->setAsEnv();
It offers two native backends behind the same PHP API. The recommended native
extension embeds the resolver and works under PHP-FPM without ffi.enable, like
ext-redis. An ext-ffi fallback loads the shared resolver at runtime for CLI
tools and local development. Both use the same Rust core as the CLI and the
other language SDKs, so profiles, providers, fallback chains, generators,
as_path,
audit reasons,
and typed missing-secret errors behave the same way.
setAsEnv() updates getenv(), $_ENV, and $_SERVER, which lets Laravel’s
env() helper and Symfony’s %env(...)% processors consume resolved secrets
during application boot. See the PHP SDK guide for installation and
framework examples.
AWS accounts often require a customer-managed KMS key or specific tags in the
same CreateSecret request. The
AWS Secrets Manager provider now accepts both on its URI:
kms_key_id and repeatable tag.NAME=VALUE parameters are applied only when
SecretSpec creates a secret. Updating an existing secret does not alter the key
or tags it was created with. This supports tag-on-create SCP and IAM guardrails
without turning routine secret updates into infrastructure changes.
The new export command resolves every secret for the active profile without
starting another process. Its default output can be evaluated by a POSIX shell:
Terminal window
eval"$(secretspecexport--profileproduction)"
Use --format dotenv to write dotenv syntax or --format json to pass the
resolved values to another tool:
GitHub and Forgejo Actions can use --format gha. SecretSpec masks every value
in the runner log and appends it to $GITHUB_ENV, making the secrets available
to later steps and third-party actions:
- name: Export secrets
run: secretspec export --profile production --format gha
- name: Deploy
run: ./deploy
Like non-interactive check, export never prompts
and exits non-zero when a required secret is missing, so it can gate a CI job.
Export attempts are also recorded in the
audit log. See the
export CLI reference for every format and option.
0.15 also tightens the behavior around profiles and fallback chains:
Provider chains are
now walked strictly in order and resolved lazily. An
undefined alias or unreachable fallback is skipped with a warning only when a
read reaches it, so a later working provider can still answer.
Chain entries accept aliases, bare provider names such as
keyring, shorthand such as
dotenv:.env, and complete provider URIs.
A single destination provider rejects unsupported
ref coordinates before contacting the store.
Multi-provider chains still validate each destination as they reach it,
because an earlier store may support coordinates a later one does not.
Profile overrides inherit the base secret’s
description and generation type. Validation now uses the effective merged
secret while still catching real conflicts, such as combining
generate with a profile default.
run passes non-UTF-8 environment variables through to the child untouched,
and command output that previously depended on map order is now stable.
Prebuilt Node.js addons now target glibc 2.28 and statically
include libdbus, restoring support for Amazon Linux 2023, RHEL 8/9, and
similar distributions.
Existing providers retain their conventional environment authentication when
an alias does not declare credentials. Provider credentials are opt-in, and
credential dependency chains are limited to one hop.
See the full changelog
for every change and fix in this release.
SecretSpec keeps a secretspec.toml that declares what secrets an application
needs, and resolves the values from a provider: your system keyring, 1Password,
Vault, a .env file, and so on. Until now it stored every secret under a naming
convention it controlled, secretspec/{project}/{profile}/{key}, and that
convention was the only place it looked.
That works when SecretSpec created the secret. It does not when the secret
already exists under a name something else chose: a db item in a 1Password
vault, a myapp/config path at a Vault mount, an environment variable your
platform already sets. To manage such a secret you had to copy its value into
SecretSpec’s convention, leaving two copies to rotate, or leave it out of
SecretSpec entirely.
SecretSpec 0.14
introduces ref. A secret can name one that already exists, by the store’s own
coordinates, and SecretSpec reads and writes that secret in place:
DATABASE_URL now resolves from the password field of the 1Password item
db. SecretSpec does not prepend a project or profile, and does not create a
name of its own.
1Password will give you an address for that field: op://Production/db/password.
The obvious design is to accept that string in the config and be done. We built
that first and removed it.
A string like op://Production/db/password names the store and the secret at
the same time, which ties the secret to 1Password. The same reference cannot
then resolve from Vault in CI and 1Password on a laptop, cannot be redirected at
a .env fixture for a test run without editing the manifest, and does not
compose with a provider fallback chain, because the chain and the address
disagree about where the secret is.
SecretSpec already decides which store to use, through providers, profiles,
fallback chains, and the --provider override. A ref names only the secret
and leaves the store to that existing machinery.
A ref is a table, not a URL. Each key names a level of structure that some
stores have:
vault which container holds the item (1Password only)
└── item the store's own name for the secret (always required)
└── section a named group of fields (1Password only)
└── field one component inside the item (structured stores)
└── version which revision to read (GCSM only)
Only item is required, because every store names its secrets somehow. item
is the complete name: it replaces the whole convention path, with no project or
profile and no folder prefix prepended. ref = { item = "GITHUB_PAT" } on the
env provider reads the environment variable GITHUB_PAT and nothing else.
The other keys refine item for stores that have that structure. A .env key
holds a single value, so field on a dotenv ref is not meaningful. A Vault KV
entry is a map, so field is required. When a store has no equivalent for a
coordinate it reports an error naming that coordinate, rather than reading a
different secret:
Error: Provider operation failed: the env provider does not support the `field` coordinate. Drop `field` from the ref for `GITHUB_PAT`.
All eleven providers resolve refs, and each rejects the coordinates it cannot
represent. A store whose secrets have no internal parts gets that rejection from
shared code, without any per-provider work.
A ref supplies the name only. Which provider resolves it follows the normal
provider resolution order: a --provider override, then
the secret’s providers chain, then profile and global defaults. That is the
same order every other secret uses.
Because the store is not part of the reference, the same ref works across
providers. Each provider in a fallback chain is asked for the same coordinates,
and one that cannot interpret them logs a warning and the chain continues:
Chain entries can also be inline scheme:// URIs, as above, with no
[providers] alias declared first.
The --provider override redirects a referenced secret the same way it
redirects a conventional one, so pointing a whole suite at a .env fixture needs
no change to the manifest:
Reads and writes use the same coordinates. secretspec set and interactive
check write to the referenced secret in place wherever the store supports
writes:
Terminal window
$secretspecsetDATABASE_URL
# writes the `password` field of the 1Password item `db`, in place
1Password edits the field with op item edit and does not create items.
Keyring, pass, dotenv, Bitwarden, Proton Pass, and LastPass write their refs as
well. Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Google Secret Manager are read-only for
refs and report that directly, rather than claiming the provider cannot write at
all.
A ref also composes with generate. If the referenced secret does not exist
yet, SecretSpec generates the value and writes it to the coordinates, so the
first check populates the item everything else already reads.
check, run, and the SDKs now group secrets by store and fetch the groups
concurrently instead of one store after another. Within a group, referenced
secrets use the store’s bulk API where it has one (AWS BatchGetSecretValue, and
the single Bitwarden, Proton Pass, and 1Password listings) and otherwise resolve
concurrently, fetching each unique coordinate once. CLI authentication for
1Password, LastPass, and Proton Pass is probed once per account or session
instead of once per provider instance.
A onepassword:// URI carrying an item path used to drop the path and target a
vault literally named vault. Item paths, including pasted
op://vault/item/field strings, now fail with an error that gives the ref
table to write instead. Provider URIs are store addresses only.
ref is always a table. String and URI forms are rejected, with the same
translation in the error.
Manifest validation now runs on every load. Rules that secretspec.toml
documents (a required secret cannot have a default, generate needs a
type, ref coordinates must be non-empty) are enforced on load rather than
ignored. A manifest that violated one of them will now fail with a clear error.
SecretSpec separates what secrets an application needs, declared in
secretspec.toml, from where the values live, a provider like your system
keyring, 1Password, or Vault. Until now, reading those resolved secrets at
runtime meant the CLI or the Rust SDK. If your service was written in Python or
Go, you shelled out to secretspec run or reimplemented resolution yourself.
SecretSpec 0.13
closes that gap. It ships native SDKs for five languages: Python,
Node.js / TypeScript, Go, Ruby, and Haskell. Each resolves the exact secrets your
manifest declares, through the same providers, profiles, fallback chains, and
generators as the CLI, with no per-language configuration.
Every SDK is a thin client over the same Rust core that powers the CLI. No
provider logic, profile resolution, chain fallback, as_path materialization, or
secret generation lives in the binding. A provider added to SecretSpec works in
every language the day it lands, and every SDK behaves identically.
The binding strategy is chosen per ecosystem:
Python: a pyo3 extension, statically linked, shipped as a self-contained
cp39-abi3 wheel.
Node.js: a napi-rs addon with prebuilt per-platform packages.
Ruby: a native C extension (mkmf) with the resolver statically linked into
a platform gem.
Go: the secretspec-ffi C ABI loaded at runtime via
purego (no cgo).
Haskell: the same C ABI, linked at build time through the Haskell FFI.
Each SDK mirrors the vocabulary of the Rust derive crate: a builder that takes a
provider, a profile, and an access reason, then load() to resolve, then a map
of secrets you can read or export into the environment.
# Python
from secretspec import SecretSpec
resolved = (
SecretSpec.builder()
.with_provider("keyring://")
.with_profile("production")
.with_reason("boot web app")
.load()
)
print(resolved.secrets["DATABASE_URL"].get) # value, or file path for as_path
resolved.set_as_env() # export into os.environ
// Node.js / TypeScript
const { SecretSpec } = require('secretspec');
const resolved = SecretSpec.builder()
.withProvider('keyring://')
.withProfile('production')
.withReason('boot web app')
.load();
console.log(resolved.secrets.DATABASE_URL.get()); // value, or as_path file path
resolved.setAsEnv(); // export into process.env
// Go
resolved, err:=secretspec.New().
WithProvider("keyring://").
WithProfile("production").
WithReason("boot web app").
Load()
fmt.Println(resolved.Secrets["DATABASE_URL"].Get()) // value, or as_path file path
resolved.SetAsEnv() // export into the environment
# Ruby
resolved=Secretspec::SecretSpec.builder
.with_provider("keyring://")
.with_profile("production")
.with_reason("boot web app")
.load
puts resolved.secrets["DATABASE_URL"].get# value, or as_path file path
resolved.set_as_env!# export into ENV
-- Haskell
resolved <-
S.load
( S.builder
& S.withProvider "keyring://"
& S.withProfile "production"
& S.withReason "boot web app"
)
S.setAsEnv resolved -- export into the environment
Across all of them, load() resolves every declared secret, a missing required
secret raises a typed MissingRequiredError, and as_path secrets come back as
a readable file path with a cleanup that removes the backing temp file. The
access reason feeds the same audit log and require_reason policy from
0.12, so a Go service is
as accountable as the CLI.
Under all five SDKs sits a new crate, secretspec-ffi: a small, versioned C ABI
for resolving secrets. If we do not ship your language yet, you can bind to it
directly. It also exposes the public Rust building blocks the SDKs share,
Secrets::resolve() and Secrets::report(), so a Rust program reaches the same
value-carrying and value-free entry points.
secretspec.toml already knows the shape of your secrets, so 0.13 can hand that
shape to your type system. secretspec schema emits a JSON Schema for your
manifest, the union of all profiles or one profile with --profile. Pipe it
through quicktype to generate idiomatic typed classes in
any language, then populate them from each SDK’s fields() map:
A coding agent reaches for the same secrets you do, but on its own initiative and
many times a session: a read looks identical whether it came from you running a
deploy or an agent exploring the codebase.
SecretSpec 0.12
makes that access accountable. It ships three things:
Audit log — every secret read and write is appended to a local,
per-user JSONL log. On by default. Values are never recorded.
Reason-on-access — secret access can require a human-readable reason,
enforced for coding agents by default.
secretspec audit command — filter and summarize the log, or pipe raw
JSON Lines to jq.
Every secret read and write, from the CLI and the Rust SDK, is appended to a
local log as JSON Lines, one event per line. Secret
values are never written, only metadata: the secret name, the profile, the
provider that served it (with any embedded credentials redacted), the outcome,
the reason, and who was asking, including the detected coding agent.
The log lives in your per-user state directory
(~/.local/state/secretspec/audit.log) and is created readable only by you. Read
it with any tool, or use the new secretspec audit command for filtering and a
readable summary:
It is configured in your user-global config
(~/.config/secretspec/config.toml), not the project’s secretspec.toml, so a
repository you clone can’t quietly turn off or redirect your audit log. The log is
a single file capped at 1 MiB, a size-bounded recent record rather than permanent
compliance history; forward it to a central system if you need that. To turn it
off entirely:
~/.config/secretspec/config.toml
[audit]
enabled = false
See Audit Logging for the full record schema and options.
SECRETSPEC_REASON is resolved by Secrets::load / load_from, which means
secretspec-derive-generated code and other library callers satisfy the policy
and supply an audit reason without any code changes.
Whichever path you use, blank or whitespace-only reasons are ignored, so they
can’t quietly satisfy the policy. Under the hood this is backed by a new
Provider::set_reason trait method (a no-op by default), so existing providers
keep working unchanged.
The new require_reason policy in the [project] table controls when a reason
is mandatory:
[project]
name = "my-app"
require_reason = "agents"# require it from agents (default), or true / false
"agents" (the default): require a reason only when a coding agent is detected.
true: require it from every caller.
false: never require it.
Because the policy lives in secretspec.toml and is enforced by SecretSpec, it
applies to everyone and every CI runner, and is inherited through extends.
Coding agents are spotted by the
detect-coding-agent crate
(Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot, and more); set
SECRETSPEC_AGENT for a harness it doesn’t recognize.
