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Secrets Manager SDK

The Secrets Manager SDK encompasses a sub-set of the Bitwarden SDK designed for external use. The SDK is written in Rust and provides bindings for multiple languages. For general binding concepts, see Language bindings. For getting started with the Secrets Manager SDK, see the setup guide.

The primary goal of the Secrets Manager SDK is to provide a stable public API that shields external consumers from the churn of internal SDK APIs. While the internal SDK evolves rapidly to support all Bitwarden clients, the SM SDK exposes a curated, backward-compatible surface.

Architecture overview​

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bitwarden crate​

The bitwarden crate is the entry point for consumers and acts as a thin wrapper around the internal crates. It re-exports a curated subset of functionality while containing very little logic itself. This indirection allows internal APIs to change without breaking external consumers.

Bindings​

The Secrets Manager SDK provides bindings for multiple languages. Currently we utilize a mix of hand written bindings for a C API, and generated bindings.

Many language bindings utilize the bitwarden-c crate that exposes a C API. This is then combined with hand written bindings for the specific language. Since manually writing FFI bindings is time consuming and difficult, a JSON-based API is provided by the bitwarden-json crate. This allows the language bindings to simply contain three FFI functions, init, run_command and free_memory.