Vault MCP Server

There is now an official Vault MCP Server from Hashicorp. Therefore, the alternative third-party Vault MCP Server will continue to exist and be updated with features and fixes, but no attempt will be made to compete with the official product. The third-party Vault MCP Server can be executed locally instead of only remotely (although in many situations remote is preferable), and will continue to be available as a container image.

Due to this policy enacted because of the official product release, there will be no formal release process, versioning, or changelog. This product is also not recommended for enterprise production usage.

The MCP Server container image is hosted at Dockerhub, and it represents the code hosted here at HEAD.

Desktop Configs

These can hopefully be extrapolated and modified to fit other clients if you want to play with this server for whatever reason.

Claude

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vault": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "VAULT_URL",
        "-e",
        "VAULT_TOKEN",
        "-e",
        "CACHE_TTL",
        "matthewschuchard/vault-mcp-server"
      ],
      "env": {
        "VAULT_URL": "<VAULT SERVER CLUSTER URL>",
        "VAULT_TOKEN": "<VAULT AUTHENTICATION TOKEN>",
        "CACHE_TTL": "<CACHE TTL FOR READ/LIST OPERATIONS>"
      }
    }
  }
}

VSCode

The MCP: Add Server --> Docker Image command can also streamline this configuration. The values below can be entered into the input prompts, and then the mcp.json file is automically opened within a pane afterward for further updates if necessary.

{
  "servers": {
    "vault": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "VAULT_URL",
        "-e",
        "VAULT_TOKEN",
        "-e",
        "CACHE_TTL",
        "matthewschuchard/vault-mcp-server"
      ],
      "env": {
        "VAULT_URL": "<VAULT SERVER CLUSTER URL>",
        "VAULT_TOKEN": "<VAULT AUTHENTICATION TOKEN>",
        "CACHE_TTL": "<CACHE TTL FOR READ/LIST OPERATIONS>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Note that CACHE_TTL is an optional environment variable that establishes the cache time for all read and list operations before new value(s) are retrieved instead of using the cached value. The default value is sixty (60) seconds.

Features

Resources

• Current Enabled ACL Policies
• Current Enabled Audit Devices
• Current Enabled Authentication Engines
• Current Enabled Secret Engines

Tools

• System Backend
  • ACL Policies
  • Audit Devices
  • Authentication Engines
  • Secrets Engines
• Secrets Backend
  • Database (Beta)
  • KV Version 2
  • PKI
  • Transit

Prompts

• mcp.vault.example-acl-policy: This displays an example Vault ACL Policy in JSON string format. The displayed policy can be modified and entered as-is to the LLM (verified with Claude), and it will understand that you want to create an ACL Policy through the Vault MCP Server with your modified content (with an auto-generated name). However, it is probably more prudent to use it as an input to the tool instead.
• mcp.vault.generate-acl-policy: This displays a pseudo-example Vault ACL Policy in JSON string format similar to the above prompt. The primary difference is that this prompt accepts a paths argument in list[str] type format, and the returned policy will contain the input paths. However, the capabilities will still be boilerplate, and need to be modified for your usage.
• mcp.vault.generate-smart-acl-policy: This is an experimental interactive workflow with an agentic LLM to create and optimize a Vault ACL policy based on user requirements and prompts. It will also return the policy in JSON string format.