SecretSpec 0.15: Provider credentials, Azure Key Vault / Gopass, and PHP SDK

Jul 16, 2026

Provider credentials — authenticate one secret provider with credentials stored in another, without exporting them to the application environment.
Azure Key Vault — store and resolve secrets with service-principal, Azure CLI, managed-identity, or AKS workload-identity authentication.
Gopass — use a GPG-encrypted, git-synchronized password store, including multi-user and multi-store setups.
PHP SDK — use the shared SecretSpec resolver from PHP-FPM, Laravel, Symfony, and CLI applications through a native extension or ext-ffi.
AWS creation guardrails — set a customer-managed KMS key and required tags when SecretSpec creates an AWS Secrets Manager secret.
secretspec export — resolve secrets without launching a command, with shell, dotenv, JSON, and GitHub Actions output.
Provider and resolution fixes — ordered lazy fallback chains, early ref validation, correctly merged profile overrides, stable output, and broader Node.js Linux compatibility.

Credentials for the secret store

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:

[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:

[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.

Log in once, without an environment variable

The new config provider login command prompts for every credential an alias declares and writes it to the configured source:

$ secretspec config provider login bws
Enter access_token for provider 'bws' (source: keyring): ****
✓ stored access_token in keyring at my-app/default/access_token

A user-level alias and its credential source can also be declared entirely with config provider add:

secretspec config provider add bws "bws://project-uuid" \
  --credential access_token=keyring
secretspec config provider login bws

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.

See Provider Credentials for the full configuration and resolution rules.

Azure Key Vault

Azure Key Vault joins the provider list with the akv:// scheme:

# Use service-principal credentials, or the current Azure CLI session
secretspec run --provider akv://myvault -- npm start

# Use the platform's managed identity
secretspec check --provider akv://myvault?auth=managed_identity

# Use AKS workload identity federation
secretspec run --provider akv://myvault?auth=workload_identity -- ./deploy

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:

[providers.azure]
uri = "akv://myvault"

[providers.azure.credentials]
tenant_id = "keyring"
client_id = "keyring"
client_secret = "keyring"

secretspec config provider login azure
secretspec run --provider azure -- ./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.

See the Azure Key Vault provider guide for authentication, naming, references, and required permissions.

Gopass joins the local providers

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:

secretspec set DATABASE_URL --provider gopass
secretspec run --provider gopass -- npm start

By default, entries live under secretspec/{project}/{profile}/{key}. A custom URI can change that layout, including omitting {project} to share secrets between repositories:

[defaults.providers]
shared = "gopass://secretspec/shared/{profile}/{key}"

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.

PHP joins the SDKs

The new cachix/secretspec Composer package brings the shared resolver to PHP:

composer require cachix/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 creation guardrails

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:

[providers]
prod = "awssm://prod@us-east-1?kms_key_id=alias/my-key&tag.team=platform&tag.env=prod"

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.

Export secrets for shells, tools, and CI

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:

eval "$(secretspec export --profile production)"

Use --format dotenv to write dotenv syntax or --format json to pass the resolved values to another tool:

$ secretspec export --profile production --format json
{
  "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://prod.example.com/mydb"
}

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.

Provider and resolution fixes

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.

Upgrading

cargo install secretspec

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.

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