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Step CLI

step is an easy-to-use CLI tool for building, operating, and automating Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) systems and workflows. It's the client counterpart to the step-ca online Certificate Authority (CA). You can use it for many common crypto and X.509 operations—either independently, or with an online CA.

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Website | Documentation | Installation | Basic Crypto Operations | Contributor's Guide

Features

Step CLI's command groups illustrate its wide-ranging uses:

step certificate: Work with X.509 (TLS/HTTPS) certificates.
- Create, revoke, validate, lint, and bundle X.509 certificates.
- Install (and remove) X.509 certificates into your system's (and browser's) trust store.
- Validate certificate deployment and renewal status for automation
- Create key pairs (RSA, ECDSA, EdDSA) and certificate signing requests (CSRs)
- Sign CSRs
- Create RFC5280 and CA/Browser Forum-compliant certificates that work for TLS and HTTPS
- Create CA certificates (root and intermediate signing certificates)
- Create self-signed & CA-signed certificates
- Inspect and lint certificates on disk or in use by a remote server
- Install root certificates so your CA is trusted by default (issue development certificates that work in browsers)
step ca: Administer and use a step-ca server, or any ACMEv2 (RFC8555) compliant CA server. ACME is the protocol used by Let's Encrypt to automate the issuance of HTTPS certificates.
- Initialize an X.509 and/or SSH CA in one command
- Authenticate and obtain a certificate using any enrollment mechanism supported by step-ca
- Securely distribute root certificates and bootstrap PKI relying parties
- Renew and revoke certificates issued by step-ca
- Submit CSRs to be signed by step-ca
- With an ACME CA, step supports the http-01 challenge type
step crypto: A general-purpose crypto toolkit
- Work with JWTs (RFC7519) and other JOSE constructs
  - Sign, verify, and inspect JSON Web Tokens (JWTs)
  - Sign, verify, and inspect arbitrary data using JSON Web Signature (JWS)
  - Encrypt and decrypt data and wrap private keys using JSON Web Encryption (JWE)
  - Create JWKs and manage key sets for use with JWT, JWE, and JWS
- Generate and verify TOTP tokens for multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Work with NaCl's high-speed tools for encryption and signing
- Apply key derivation functions (KDFs) and verify passwords using scrypt, bcrypt, and argo2
- Generate and check file hashes
step oauth: Add an OAuth 2.0 single sign-on flow to any CLI application.
- Supports OAuth authorization code, out-of-band (OOB), JWT bearer, and refresh token flows
- Get OAuth access tokens and OIDC identity tokens at the command line from any provider.
- Verify OIDC identity tokens (step crypto jwt verify)
step ssh: Create and manage SSH certificates (requires an online or offline step-ca instance)
- Generate SSH user and host key pairs and short-lived certificates
- Add and remove certificates to the SSH agent
- Inspect SSH certificates
- Login and use single sign-on SSH

Installation

See our installation docs here.

Example

Here's a quick example, combining step oauth and step crypto to get and verify the signature of a Google OAuth OIDC token:

Animated terminal showing step in practice

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