How Bitwarden Secrets Manager offers built-in flexibility for developers

All modern development teams are impacted by the same global secrets management trends, but their requirements are not ‘one-size-fits-all’. Many teams also have specialized secrets management needs depending on their industry, location, development pipeline, security infrastructure, and more.

Bitwarden Secrets Manager empowers development teams of all sizes to securely store, share, and automate their infrastructure and application secrets, keeping their business protected from the rising threat of data breaches. Supporting custom operations via software development kits (SDKs), an out-of-the-box command line interface (CLI), package management wrappers, integrations, and an open source code base, Bitwarden Secrets Manager is a flexible solution trusted by businesses everywhere.

This article will explore how developer teams can leverage flexible functionality and options offered by Bitwarden Secrets Manager to address their specific secrets management needs and development environment. 

The Bitwarden Secrets Manager CLI is the primary method by which users securely inject their secrets into applications and infrastructure, fostering machine-to-machine communication. In addition to the out-of-box CLI, users can leverage additional CLI wrappers for various package managers like Docker, Brew, and Scoop, which are coming soon.

Bitwarden customer, AccuRanker saw the benefits of the CLI first hand after building their own custom CLI wrapper to integrate with the AccuRanker backend system. Says backend engineer Phillip Kampmann, “We’re now able to access secrets such as encryption keys through our own internal API.”

Bitwarden Secrets Manager offers many integrations to easily build connections between your various machines, CI/CD pipelines, automation tools, and cloud providers, saving your team time and enhancing productivity. GitHub actions and Ansible integrations are available now for securing your development pipelines. Keep an eye out for the Kubernetes and Terraform integrations, coming to Bitwarden Secrets Manager soon. 

If a development team decides they would like to build their own integrations and operations for Bitwarden Secrets Manager, software development kits (SDKs) are a great place to start. SDKs provide all the language-specific development tools they need in one installable package, so nothing needs to be built from scratch. SDK languages available include C++, C#, Go, Java, JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, swift, kotlin, and Rust with more languages being added all the time.

Bitwarden customer, Titanom Technologies utilized the Bitwarden Secrets Manager SDK for Rust to develop their own custom CLI. 

“It reads a project configuration file, requests all the secrets from Secrets Manager, and then injects them into a process. This way, you don't have to specify them manually in a configuration file,” says Head of IT, Jannis Morgenstern. 

This custom solution has a direct impact on the bottom line, driving decreased workload for leadership and increased developer productivity. “I can tell you that my workload has decreased, probably by one to three hours per week. Productivity has also increased because of the tool I developed,” says Morgenstern. 

The Bitwarden Secrets Manager source code is hosted on GitHub for everyone to review, audit, and contribute to, opening the gate for community-shared enhancements. If your team wants a particular feature or functionality in the product and have the expertise to build it, there is nothing stopping you from submitting it as a code contribution. After extensive code review, it may be available for all users to benefit from! If your team doesn’t have the expertise, submit a feature request via the community forums.

Now is the time to start securing your development and infrastructure secrets with the trusted secrets management solution by Bitwarden. Sign up for a free 7-day teams or enterprise trial of Bitwarden Secrets Manager, or set up a free account.