Azure Key Vault Certificates client library for Python

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) | 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

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

• An Azure subscription

• Python 3.6 or later

• A Key Vault. If you need to create one, you can use the Azure Cloud Shell to create one with these commands (replace "my-resource-group" and "my-key-vault" with your own, unique names):

  (Optional) if you want a new resource group to hold the Key Vault:

  az group create --name my-resource-group --location westus2
  

  Create the Key Vault:

  az keyvault create --resource-group my-resource-group --name my-key-vault
  

  Output:

  {
      "id": "...",
      "location": "westus2",
      "name": "my-key-vault",
      "properties": {
          "accessPolicies": [...],
          "createMode": null,
          "enablePurgeProtection": null,
          "enableSoftDelete": null,
          "enabledForDeployment": false,
          "enabledForDiskEncryption": null,
          "enabledForTemplateDeployment": null,
          "networkAcls": null,
          "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
          "sku": { "name": "standard" },
          "tenantId": "...",
          "vaultUri": "https://my-key-vault.vault.azure.net/"
      },
      "resourceGroup": "my-resource-group",
      "type": "Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults"
  }
  

  The "vaultUri" property is the vault_url used by CertificateClient

Authenticate the client

This document demonstrates using DefaultAzureCredential to authenticate as a service principal. However, CertificateClient accepts any azure-identity credential. See the azure-identity documentation for more information about other credentials.

Create a service principal (optional)

This Azure Cloud Shell snippet shows how to create a new service principal. Before using it, replace "your-application-name" with a more appropriate name for your service principal.

Create a service principal:

az ad sp create-for-rbac --name http://my-application --skip-assignment

Output:

{
    "appId": "generated app id",
    "displayName": "my-application",
    "name": "http://my-application",
    "password": "random password",
    "tenant": "tenant id"
}

Use the output to set AZURE_CLIENT_ID ("appId" above), AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET ("password" above) and AZURE_TENANT_ID ("tenant" above) environment variables. The following example shows a way to do this in Bash:

export AZURE_CLIENT_ID="generated app id"
export AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET="random password"
export AZURE_TENANT_ID="tenant id"

Authorize the service principal to perform certificate operations in your Key Vault:

az keyvault set-policy --name my-key-vault --spn $AZURE_CLIENT_ID --certificate-permissions backup create delete get import list purge recover restore update

Possible certificate permissions: backup, create, delete, deleteissuers, get, getissuers, import, list, listissuers, managecontacts, manageissuers, purge, recover, restore, setissuers, update

If you have enabled role-based access control (RBAC) for Key Vault instead, you can find roles like "Key Vault Certificates Officer" in our RBAC guide.

Create a client

Once the AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET and AZURE_TENANT_ID environment variables are set, DefaultAzureCredential will be able to authenticate the CertificateClient.

Constructing the client also requires your vault's URL, which you can get from the Azure CLI or the Azure Portal. In the Azure Portal, this URL is the vault's "DNS Name".

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)

Key concepts

Certificate Client

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
• Retrieve a Certificate
• Update Properties of an existing Certificate
• Delete a Certificate
• List Properties of Certificates
• Asynchronously create a Certificate
• Asynchronously list properties of Certificates

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:

• hello_world.py and hello_world_async.py - create/get/update/delete certificates
• backup_restore_operations.py and backup_restore_operations_async.py - backup and recover certificates
• list_operations.py and list_operations_async.py - list certificates
• recover_purge_operations.py and recover_purge_operations_async.py - recover and purge certificates
• issuers.py and issuers_async.py - manage certificate issuers
• contacts.py and contacts_async.py - manage certificate contacts

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.

Release History

4.4.0 (2022-03-28)

Features Added

• Key Vault API version 7.3 is now the default
• Added support for multi-tenant authentication when using azure-identity 1.8.0 or newer (#20698)

Bugs Fixed

• KeyType now ignores casing during declaration, which resolves a scenario where Key Vault keys created with non-standard casing could not be fetched with the SDK (#22797)

Other Changes

• (From 4.4.0b3) Python 2.7 is no longer supported. Please use Python version 3.6 or later.
• Updated minimum azure-core version to 1.20.0
• (From 4.4.0b2) To support multi-tenant authentication, get_token calls during challenge authentication requests now pass in a tenant_id keyword argument (#20698). See https://aka.ms/azsdk/python/identity/tokencredential for more details on how to integrate this parameter if get_token is implemented by a custom credential.

4.4.0b3 (2022-02-08)

Other Changes

• Python 2.7 is no longer supported. Please use Python version 3.6 or later.
• (From 4.4.0b2) To support multi-tenant authentication, get_token calls during challenge authentication requests now pass in a tenant_id keyword argument (#20698)

4.4.0b2 (2021-11-11)

Features Added

• Added support for multi-tenant authentication when using azure-identity 1.7.1 or newer (#20698)

Other Changes

• Updated minimum azure-core version to 1.15.0

4.4.0b1 (2021-09-09)

Features Added

• Key Vault API version 7.3-preview is now the default

Other Changes

• Updated type hints to fix mypy errors (#19158)

4.3.0 (2021-06-22)

This is the last version to support Python 3.5. The next version will require Python 2.7 or 3.6+.

Changed

• Key Vault API version 7.2 is now the default
• Updated minimum msrest version to 0.6.21
• The issuer_name parameter for CertificatePolicy is now optional

Added

• Added class KeyVaultCertificateIdentifier that parses out a full ID returned by Key Vault, so users can easily access the certificate's name, vault_url, and version.

4.2.1 (2020-09-08)

Fixed

• Correct typing for paging methods
• Fixed incompatibility issues with API version 2016-10-01

4.2.0 (2020-08-11)

Fixed

• Fixed an AttributeError during get_certificate_version
• import_certificate no longer raises AttributeError when the policy keyword argument isn't passed
• Values of x-ms-keyvault-region and x-ms-keyvault-service-version headers are no longer redacted in logging output

Changed

• Key Vault API version 7.1 is now the default
• Updated minimum azure-core version to 1.7.0

Added

• At construction, clients accept a CustomHookPolicy through the optional keyword argument custom_hook_policy
• All client requests include a unique ID in the header x-ms-client-request-id
• Dependency on azure-common for multiapi support

4.2.0b1 (2020-03-10)

• Support for Key Vault API version 7.1-preview (#10124)
  • Added recoverable_days to CertificateProperties
  • Added ApiVersion enum identifying Key Vault versions supported by this package

4.1.0 (2020-03-10)

• CertificateClient instances have a close method which closes opened sockets. Used as a context manager, a CertificateClient closes opened sockets on exit. (#9906)
• Pollers no longer sleep after operation completion (#9991)

4.0.1 (2020-02-11)

• azure.keyvault.certificates defines __version__
• Updated msrest requirement to >=0.6.0
• Challenge authentication policy requires TLS (#9457)
• Methods no longer raise the internal error KeyVaultErrorException (#9690)

4.0.0 (2020-01-08)

• First GA release

4.0.0b7 (2019-12-17)

• Challenge authentication policy preserves request options (#8999)
• Added vault_url property to CertificateOperation
• Removed id, expires_on, not_before, and recover_level properties from CertificatePolicy
• Removed vault_url property from CertificateIssuer
• Removed vault_url property from IssuerProperties

4.0.0b6 (2019-12-04)

• Updated msrest requirement to >=0.6.0
• Renamed get_policy to get_certificate_policy
• Renamed update_policy to update_certificate_policy
• Renamed create_contacts to set_contacts
• Renamed parameter admin_details of create_issuer and update_issuer to admin_contacts
• Renamed all name parameters to include the name of the object whose name we are referring to. For example, the name parameter of get_certificate is now certificate_name
• Renamed AdministratorDetails to AdministratorContact
• Renamed the ekus property of CertificatePolicy to enhanced_key_usage
• Renamed the curve property of CertificatePolicy to key_curve_name
• Renamed the san_upns property of CertificatePolicy to san_user_principal_names
• Made the subject_name property of CertificatePolicy a kwarg and renamed it to subject
• Renamed the deleted_date property of DeletedCertificate to deleted_on
• Removed the issuer_properties property from CertificateIssuer and added the provider property directly onto CertificateIssuer
• Renamed property admin_details of CertificateIssuer to admin_contacts
• Renamed the thumbprint property of CertificateProperties to x509_thumbprint
• Added WellKnownIssuerNames enum class that holds popular issuer names
• Renamed SecretContentType enum class to CertificateContentType

4.0.0b5 (2019-11-01)

• Removed redundant method get_pending_certificate_signing_request(). A pending CSR can be retrieved via get_certificate_operation().

• Renamed the sync method create_certificate to begin_create_certificate

• Renamed restore_certificate to restore_certificate_backup

• Renamed get_certificate to get_certificate_version

• Renamed get_certificate_with_policy to get_certificate

• Renamed list_certificates to list_properties_of_certificates

• Renamed list_properties_of_issuers to list_properties_of_issuers

• Renamed list_certificate_versions to list_properties_of_certificate_versions

• create_certificate now has policy as a required parameter

• All optional positional parameters besides version have been moved to kwargs

• Renamed sync method delete_certificate to begin_delete_certificate

• Renamed sync method recover_certificate to begin_recover_deleted_certificate

• Renamed async method recover_certificate to recover_deleted_certificate

• The sync method begin_delete_certificate and async delete_certificate now return pollers that return a DeletedCertificate

• The sync method begin_recover_deleted_certificate and async recover_deleted_certificate now return pollers that return a KeyVaultCertificate

• Renamed enum ActionType to CertificatePolicyAction

• Renamed Certificate to KeyVaultCertificate

• Renamed Contact to CertificateContact

• Renamed Issuer to CertificateIssuer

• Renamed CertificateError to CertificateOperationError

• Renamed expires property of CertificateProperties and CertificatePolicy to expires_on

• Renamed created property of CertificateProperties, CertificatePolicy, and CertificateIssuer to created_on

• Renamed updated property of CertificateProperties, CertificatePolicy, and CertificateIssuer to updated_on

• The vault_endpoint parameter of CertificateClient has been renamed to vault_url

• The property vault_endpoint has been renamed to vault_url in all models

• CertificatePolicy now has a public class method get_default allowing users to get the default CertificatePolicy

• Logging can now be enabled properly on the client level

4.0.0b4 (2019-10-08)

• Enums JsonWebKeyCurveName and JsonWebKeyType have been renamed to KeyCurveName and KeyType, respectively.

• Both async and sync versions of create_certificate now return pollers that return the created Certificate if creation is successful, and a CertificateOperation if not.

• Certificate now has attribute properties, which holds certain properties of the certificate, such as version. This changes the shape of the Certificate type, as certain properties of Certificate (such as version) have to be accessed through the properties property.

• update_certificate has been renamed to update_certificate_properties

• The vault_url parameter of CertificateClient has been renamed to vault_endpoint

• The property vault_url has been renamed to vault_endpoint in all models

4.0.0b3 (2019-09-11)

Version 4.0.0b3 is the first preview of our efforts to create a user-friendly and Pythonic client library for Azure Key Vault's certificates.

This library is not a direct replacement for azure-keyvault. Applications using that library would require code changes to use azure-keyvault-certificates. This package's documentation and samples demonstrate the new API.

Breaking changes from azure-keyvault:

• Packages scoped by functionality
  • azure-keyvault-certificates contains a client for certificate operations
• Client instances are scoped to vaults (an instance interacts with one vault only)
• Authentication using azure-identity credentials
  • see this package's documentation , and the Azure Identity documentation for more information

New Features:

• Distributed tracing framework OpenCensus is now supported
• Asynchronous API supported on Python 3.5.3+
  • the azure.keyvault.certificates.aio namespace contains an async equivalent of the synchronous client in azure.keyvault.certificates
  • Async clients use aiohttp for transport by default. See azure-core documentation for more information about using other transports.