Installing DVault

Installing DVault

There are a couple of ways you can install DVault:

DVault is written in dart so if you have dart installed you can install DVault by running:

pub global activate dvault

The DVault project also provides binaries for each of the supported platforms.

You can download the latest version from one of the following links:

TODO: use pub_release package to deploy exes.

Linux Windows Mac OSX

Initialising DVault

Once you have installed DVault you need to initialise it:

dvault init

DVault will ask you for a passphrase which is used to secure your private key.

IF YOU FORGET YOUR PASSPHRASE YOU ARE SCREWED. Store it somewhere safely.

When you initialise DVault it generates a public/private key pair and stores them in your home directory in a file called .dvault.

If you need to automate the initialisation of DVault then we support a number of ways to pass in the passphrase.

In order from most secure to least secure:

Method	Description	Example	Notes
ask	dvault will prompt the user for the passphrase	dvault init or dvault -p=ask init	This is the default method and the most secure.
stdin	Pipe the passphrase in via standard in	echo 'my passphrase' \| dvault -p=stdin init	Using echo as this example does actually makes this the least secure. You should have your application write directly to stdin rather than spawning a process with the passphrase on the cli.
env	Pass the passphrase via the environment variable DVAULT_PASSPHRASE	export DVAULT_PASSPHRASE="my passphrase";dvault -p=env init	Many OSs let a privileged user examine the environment variables associated with any process so using an environment variable could expose your passphrase to other users on the same system.
arg	Pass the passphrase via a command argument	dvault -p=arg -P="my passphrase" init	If you use the -P option you don't actually need to provide the -p=arg option as its assumed. You can't use the -P option with any other -p option.