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Azure Key Vault Certificates client library for Python - version 4.9.0

  • Article

Azure Key Vault helps solve the following problems:

  • Certificate management (this library) - create, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates
  • Cryptographic key management (azure-keyvault-keys) - create, store, and control access to the keys used to encrypt your data
  • Secrets management (azure-keyvault-secrets) - securely store and control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets
  • Vault administration (azure-keyvault-administration) - role-based access control (RBAC), and vault-level backup and restore options

Source code | Package (PyPI) | Package (Conda) | API reference documentation | Product documentation | Samples

Disclaimer

Azure SDK Python packages support for Python 2.7 has ended 01 January 2022. For more information and questions, please refer to https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues/20691. Python 3.8 or later is required to use this package. For more details, please refer to Azure SDK for Python version support policy.

Getting started

Install the package

Install azure-keyvault-certificates and azure-identity with pip:

pip install azure-keyvault-certificates azure-identity

azure-identity is used for Azure Active Directory authentication as demonstrated below.

Prerequisites

Authenticate the client

In order to interact with the Azure Key Vault service, you will need an instance of a CertificateClient, as well as a vault url and a credential object. This document demonstrates using a DefaultAzureCredential, which is appropriate for most scenarios, including local development and production environments. We recommend using a managed identity for authentication in production environments.

See azure-identity documentation for more information about other methods of authentication and their corresponding credential types.

Create a client

After configuring your environment for the DefaultAzureCredential to use a suitable method of authentication, you can do the following to create a certificate client (replacing the value of VAULT_URL with your vault's URL):

VAULT_URL = os.environ["VAULT_URL"]
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
client = CertificateClient(vault_url=VAULT_URL, credential=credential)

NOTE: For an asynchronous client, import azure.keyvault.certificates.aio's CertificateClient instead.

Key concepts

CertificateClient

With a CertificateClient you can get certificates from the vault, create new certificates and new versions of existing certificates, update certificate metadata, and delete certificates. You can also manage certificate issuers, contacts, and management policies of certificates. This is illustrated in the examples below.

Examples

This section contains code snippets covering common tasks:

Create a certificate

begin_create_certificate creates a certificate to be stored in the Azure Key Vault. If a certificate with the same name already exists, a new version of the certificate is created. Before creating a certificate, a management policy for the certificate can be created or our default policy will be used. This method returns a long running operation poller.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient, CertificatePolicy

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

create_certificate_poller = certificate_client.begin_create_certificate(
    certificate_name="cert-name", policy=CertificatePolicy.get_default()
)
print(create_certificate_poller.result())

If you would like to check the status of your certificate creation, you can call status() on the poller or get_certificate_operation with the name of the certificate.

Retrieve a certificate

get_certificate retrieves the latest version of a certificate previously stored in the Key Vault.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

certificate = certificate_client.get_certificate("cert-name")

print(certificate.name)
print(certificate.properties.version)
print(certificate.policy.issuer_name)

get_certificate_version retrieves a specific version of a certificate.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)
certificate = certificate_client.get_certificate_version(certificate_name="cert-name", version="cert-version")

print(certificate.name)
print(certificate.properties.version)

Update properties of an existing certificate

update_certificate_properties updates a certificate previously stored in the Key Vault.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

# we will now disable the certificate for further use
updated_certificate= certificate_client.update_certificate_properties(
    certificate_name="cert-name", enabled=False
)

print(updated_certificate.name)
print(updated_certificate.properties.enabled)

Delete a certificate

begin_delete_certificate requests Key Vault delete a certificate, returning a poller which allows you to wait for the deletion to finish. Waiting is helpful when the vault has soft-delete enabled, and you want to purge (permanently delete) the certificate as soon as possible. When soft-delete is disabled, begin_delete_certificate itself is permanent.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

deleted_certificate_poller = certificate_client.begin_delete_certificate("cert-name")

deleted_certificate = deleted_certificate_poller.result()
print(deleted_certificate.name)
print(deleted_certificate.deleted_on)

List properties of certificates

list_properties_of_certificates lists the properties of all certificates in the specified Key Vault.

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

certificates = certificate_client.list_properties_of_certificates()

for certificate in certificates:
    # this list doesn't include versions of the certificates
    print(certificate.name)

Async operations

This library includes a complete set of async APIs. To use them, you must first install an async transport, such as aiohttp. See azure-core documentation for more information.

Async clients and credentials should be closed when they're no longer needed. These objects are async context managers and define async close methods. For example:

from azure.identity.aio import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates.aio import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

# call close when the client and credential are no longer needed
client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)
...
await client.close()
await credential.close()

# alternatively, use them as async context managers (contextlib.AsyncExitStack can help)
client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)
async with client:
  async with credential:
    ...

Asynchronously create a certificate

create_certificate creates a certificate to be stored in the Azure Key Vault. If a certificate with the same name already exists, a new version of the certificate is created. Before creating a certificate, a management policy for the certificate can be created or our default policy will be used. Awaiting create_certificate returns your created certificate if creation is successful, and a CertificateOperation if it is not.

from azure.identity.aio import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates.aio import CertificateClient
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificatePolicy

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

create_certificate_result = await certificate_client.create_certificate(
    certificate_name="cert-name", policy=CertificatePolicy.get_default()
)
print(create_certificate_result)

Asynchronously list properties of certificates

list_properties_of_certificates lists all the properties of the certificates in the client's vault:

from azure.identity.aio import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates.aio import CertificateClient

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

certificates = certificate_client.list_properties_of_certificates()
async for certificate in certificates:
    print(certificate.name)

Troubleshooting

See the azure-keyvault-certificates troubleshooting guide for details on how to diagnose various failure scenarios.

General

Key Vault clients raise exceptions defined in azure-core. For example, if you try to get a key that doesn't exist in the vault, CertificateClient raises ResourceNotFoundError:

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient
from azure.core.exceptions import ResourceNotFoundError

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
certificate_client = CertificateClient(vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/", credential=credential)

try:
    certificate_client.get_certificate("which-does-not-exist")
except ResourceNotFoundError as e:
    print(e.message)

Logging

This library uses the standard logging library for logging. Basic information about HTTP sessions (URLs, headers, etc.) is logged at INFO level.

Detailed DEBUG level logging, including request/response bodies and unredacted headers, can be enabled on a client with the logging_enable argument:

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.keyvault.certificates import CertificateClient
import sys
import logging

# Create a logger for the 'azure' SDK
logger = logging.getLogger('azure')
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

# Configure a console output
handler = logging.StreamHandler(stream=sys.stdout)
logger.addHandler(handler)

credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

# This client will log detailed information about its HTTP sessions, at DEBUG level
client = CertificateClient(
    vault_url="https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/",
    credential=credential,
    logging_enable=True
)

Network trace logging can also be enabled for any single operation:

certificate = certificate_client.get_certificate(certificate_name="cert-name", logging_enable=True)

Next steps

Several samples are available in the Azure SDK for Python GitHub repository. These samples provide example code for additional Key Vault scenarios:

Additional documentation

For more extensive documentation on Azure Key Vault, see the API reference documentation.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information, see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

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