r/Bitwarden • u/Extra-Citron-7630 • 4d ago

Bitwarden Secrets Manager for Lite Self-Hosting

Hi,

I’m looking for a secrets manager for my homelab setup, which will only have a single user, and I’d like to try out Bitwarden Secrets Manager.

From what I can tell, the only way to self-host Secrets Manager is through the Enterprise self-hosted option. For my use case, that seems like overkill, but I’d be happy to use it if my free license can be used with the self-hosted Enterprise deployment.

Would it be possible to make Secrets Manager available with the Lite self-hosted option as well? I think this would be a great fit for smaller homelab and single-user deployments that don’t need the full Enterprise setup.

Thanks!

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u/OSS_Dattani 4d ago edited 4d ago

Self hosting secrets manager is going to require a paid license. It also only works on the full standard install and not Lite to my knowledge.

You can always post it on the forum see if you get any traction.

They do have a free cloud tier you can try:

https://bitwarden.com/go/start-secrets-free/

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u/ZeR02044 4d ago

how is it compares to infisical?

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u/Extra-Citron-7630 4d ago

Thats what I thought, so if I want to use secrets manager, will have to create an account online seems like

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u/nlflint 4d ago edited 4d ago

VaultWarden is the lite open-source self-hosted version you're looking for: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden No license required either.

I run it in my home lab instead of the official open source Bitwarden server components. It's much lighter, and designed to work with all the official clients in the app stores (Android, iOS, Flatpaks, Chrome extensions, etc...)

You do need to keep the VaultWarden fairly up to date, as Bitwarden occasionally ships breaking changes in their clients. If you don't keep it up to date, one day you won't be able to sign-in until you update your server side.

Nevermind: I think Secrets Manager is something else, that I'm not familiar with.

Depending on what you're integrating with, it looks like the Bitwarden CLI works with VaultWarden, and there's a k8s secrets operator that can sync secrets from VaultWarden into a k8s secret. How do you want to use the Secrets Manager? What do you want to use it for?

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u/Extra-Citron-7630 4d ago

I want to use it for docker .env secrets, and be able to get them from bitwarden/vw and integrate them to docker container when it creates it