Creates a new secret. A
secret can be a password, a set of credentials such as a user name and password, an OAuth token, or other secret information that you store in an encrypted form in Secrets Manager. The secret also includes the connection information to access a database or other service, which Secrets Manager doesn't encrypt. A secret in Secrets Manager consists of both the protected secret data and the important information needed to manage the secret.
For secrets that use
managed rotation, you need to create the secret through the managing service. For more information, see
Secrets Manager secrets managed by other Amazon Web Services services.
For information about creating a secret in the console, see
Create a secret.
To create a secret, you can provide the secret value to be encrypted in either the
SecretString parameter or the
SecretBinary parameter, but not both. If you include
SecretString or
SecretBinary then Secrets Manager creates an initial secret version and automatically attaches the staging label
AWSCURRENT to it.
For database credentials you want to rotate, for Secrets Manager to be able to rotate the secret, you must make sure the JSON you store in the
SecretString matches the
JSON structure of a database secret.
If you don't specify an KMS encryption key, Secrets Manager uses the Amazon Web Services managed key
aws/secretsmanager. If this key doesn't already exist in your account, then Secrets Manager creates it for you automatically. All users and roles in the Amazon Web Services account automatically have access to use
aws/secretsmanager. Creating
aws/secretsmanager can result in a one-time significant delay in returning the result.
If the secret is in a different Amazon Web Services account from the credentials calling the API, then you can't use
aws/secretsmanager to encrypt the secret, and you must create and use a customer managed KMS key.
Secrets Manager generates a CloudTrail log entry when you call this action. Do not include sensitive information in request parameters except
SecretBinary or
SecretString because it might be logged. For more information, see
Logging Secrets Manager events with CloudTrail.
Required permissions: secretsmanager:CreateSecret. If you include tags in the secret, you also need
secretsmanager:TagResource. To add replica Regions, you must also have
secretsmanager:ReplicateSecretToRegions. For more information, see
IAM policy actions for Secrets Manager and
Authentication and access control in Secrets Manager.
To encrypt the secret with a KMS key other than
aws/secretsmanager, you need
kms:GenerateDataKey and
kms:Decrypt permission to the key.
When you enter commands in a command shell, there is a risk of the command history being accessed or utilities having access to your command parameters. This is a concern if the command includes the value of a secret. Learn how to Mitigate the risks of using command-line tools to store Secrets Manager secrets.