events

Use the events command to get a real-time display of events generated by Vault and subscribe to Vault events. Note that the events subscribe runs indefinitly and will not exit on its own unless it encounters an unexpected error. Similar to tail -f in the Unix world, you must terminate the process from the command line to end the events command.

Specify the desired event types (also called "topics") as a glob pattern. To match against multiple events, use * as a wildcard. The command returns serialized JSON objects in the default protobuf JSON serialization format with one line per event received.

Examples

Subscribe to all events:

$ vault events subscribe '*'

Subscribe to all KV events:

$ vault events subscribe 'kv*'

Subscribe to all kv-v2/data-write events:

$ vault events subscribe kv-v2/data-write

Subscribe to all KV events in the current and ns1 namespaces for the secret secret/data/foo that do not involve writing data:

$ vault events subscribe -namespaces=ns1 -filter='data_path == secret/data/foo and operation != "data-write"' 'kv*'

Usage

events subscribe supports the following flags in addition to the standard set of flags included on all commands.

Options

• -timeout: (duration: "") - close the WebSocket automatically after the specified duration.

• -filter (string: "") - Filter expression used to select events to be sent through the WebSocket.

Refer to the Filter expressions guide in the Boundary documentation for a complete list of filtering options and an explanation on how we evaluate filter expressions.

The following values are available in the filter expression:

• event_type: the event type, e.g., kv-v2/data-write.

  • operation: the operation name that caused the event, e.g., write.
  • source_plugin_mount: the mount of the plugin that produced the event, e.g., secret/
  • data_path: the API path that can be used to access the data of the secret related to the event, e.g., secret/data/foo
  • namespace: the path of the namespace that created the event, e.g., ns1/

  The filter string is empty by default. Unfiltered subscription requests match to all events that the requestor has access to for the target event type. When the filter string is not empty, Vault applies the filter conditions after the policy checks to narrow the events provided in the response.

  Filters can be straightforward path matches like data_path == secret/data/foo, which specifies that Vault should pass return events that refer to the secret/data/foo secret to the WebSocket. Or more complex statements that exclude specific operations. For example:

  data_path == secret/data/foo and operation != write

Enterprise options

• -namespaces (string) - Additional child namespaces for the subscription. Repeat the flag to add additional namespace patterns to the subscription request. Vault automatically prepends the issuing namespace for the request to the provided namespace. For example, if you include -namespaces=ns2 on a request made in the ns1 namespace, Vault will attempt to subscribe you to events under the ns1/ns2 and ns1 namespaces. You can use the * character to include wildcards in the namespace pattern. By default, Vault will only subscribe to events in the requesting namespace.