Blog

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

Jul 16, 2026

Domen Kožar

SecretSpec 0.15 ships:

• 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:

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.

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:

secretspec.toml

[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:

~/.config/secretspec/config.toml

[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:

secretspec.toml

[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.

Questions or feedback? Join us on Discord.

SecretSpec 0.14: Secret References

Jul 9, 2026

Domen Kožar

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:

[profiles.production]
DATABASE_URL = { description = "Postgres DSN", ref = { item = "db", field = "password" }, providers = ["prod_op"] }

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.

Why not just paste the address

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.

Coordinates

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:

GITHUB_TOKEN = { description = "GitHub token", ref = { item = "GITHUB_PAT", field = "x" }, providers = ["env"] }

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.

References name, providers route

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:

[profiles.production]
DATABASE_URL = { description = "Postgres DSN", ref = { item = "db", field = "password" }, providers = ["onepassword://Production", "keyring"] }

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:

$ secretspec run --provider dotenv:.env.fixtures -- cargo test

Writing through a ref

Reads and writes use the same coordinates. secretspec set and interactive check write to the referenced secret in place wherever the store supports writes:

$ secretspec set DATABASE_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.

Faster resolution

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.

Upgrading

cargo install secretspec

Three changes to be aware of:

• 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.

See Secret References for the full model and the configuration reference for how each provider maps the coordinates. Questions or feedback? Join us on Discord.

SecretSpec 0.13: SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, and Haskell

Jul 3, 2026

Domen Kožar

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.

Native bindings over one resolver

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.

The same three steps, in your language

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.

Write your own binding

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.

Typed secrets, one schema for every language

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:

secretspec schema | quicktype -s schema --top-level SecretSpec --lang python -o secrets_gen.py

typed = Secrets.from_dict(resolved.fields())
print(typed.database_url)  # typed str

One schema drives every language’s type system, with no hand-written emitter per language.

Install

pip install secretspec                              # Python
npm install secretspec                              # Node.js / TypeScript
gem install secretspec                              # Ruby
go get github.com/cachix/secretspec/secretspec-go   # Go

For Haskell, add secretspec from Hackage to your build-depends. The CLI and Rust SDK upgrade as usual:

cargo install secretspec

See the SDK overview for the per-language guides. Questions or feedback? Join us on Discord.

SecretSpec 0.12: audit logs and coding agents

Jun 8, 2026

Domen Kožar

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.

Behavior change in 0.12

If you run SecretSpec inside a coding agent, secret access now fails until a reason is supplied. This is the new default (require_reason = "agents"). Opt out with require_reason = false in the [project] table. Existing providers and library callers keep working unchanged. See Upgrading.

The audit log

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.

{
  "v": 1,
  "ts": "2026-06-04T17:04:00.893Z",
  "action": "get",
  "project": "my-app",
  "profile": "production",
  "key": "DATABASE_URL",
  "provider": "keyring://",
  "outcome": "found",
  "reason": "deploy web frontend",
  "actor": { "user": "alice", "agent": "claude-code", "is_agent": true },
  "version": "0.12.0"
}

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:

# Last 20 entries, formatted
secretspec audit -n 20

# Only `run` events for one project
secretspec audit --project my-app --action run

# Raw JSON Lines, piped to jq
secretspec audit --json | jq 'select(.outcome == "missing")'

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.

Supplying a reason

When a coding agent like Claude Code reaches for a secret without a reason, the access is refused and the agent is told exactly what to do next:

$ secretspec run -- npm test
Error: Accessing secrets requires a reason. Provide one with --reason
"<why you are accessing these secrets>", the SECRETSPEC_REASON environment
variable, or Secrets::with_reason() in the SDK. (Policy: require_reason in
[project] of secretspec.toml — defaults to "agents"; set it to false to
disable.)

Claude Code reads that message, states why it needs the secret, and retries:

secretspec run --reason "run the test suite before opening a PR" -- npm test

Both the refusal and the successful retry land in the audit log, so the reason is tied to the access. There are three ways to supply a reason:

Source	Scope	Precedence
--reason flag	CLI	highest
Secrets::with_reason()	SDK	overrides env
SECRETSPEC_REASON	CLI + SDK + derive	lowest

# CLI: the most explicit option, overrides the others
secretspec run --reason "deploying release 0.12" -- ./deploy.sh

// SDK: the programmatic equivalent of --reason
let secrets = Secrets::load(/* ... */)?.with_reason("nightly backup job");

# Env: lowest precedence, but honored everywhere
export SECRETSPEC_REASON="nightly backup job"

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.

Configuring when a reason is required

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.

Upgrading

cargo install secretspec

Remember the new default: agents must pass a reason: set require_reason = false to opt out.

Questions or feedback? Join us on Discord.