Deploy HCP Boundary and log in

1. In the HCP Boundary portal, open the Boundary Overview page, and click the copy icon in the Copy this into Boundary Desktop section. This copies your environment’s Boundary Cluster URL.

2. Open a terminal session and set the BOUNDARY_ADDR environment variable to the copied Cluster URL.

   $ export BOUNDARY_ADDR=<boundary-cluster-url>
   

   Copy

3. Log in with the administrator credentials you created when you deployed the HCP Boundary instance.

   $ boundary authenticate
   Please enter the login name (it will be hidden):
   Please enter the password (it will be hidden):
   
   Authentication information:
     Account ID:      acctpw_VOeNSFX8pQ
     Auth Method ID:  ampw_wxzojlKJLN
     Expiration Time: Mon, 13 Feb 2023 12:35:32 MST
     User ID:         u_1vUkf5fPs9
   
   The token was successfully stored in the chosen keyring and is not displayed here.
   

   Copy

You are now logged into your HCP Boundary instance's Global scope via the CLI. This is the default scope for all new Boundary clusters.

If you are on Windows or macOS, the system password store will be used to store the new token. On any other operating system, you may get an error indicating that the token could not be stored. Boundary defaults to using pass on these machines, which uses GNU Privacy Guard to encrypt values. If it is not available, the token will be displayed and can be stored in a system of your choice and passed in via the BOUNDARY_TOKEN environment variable.

It is recommended to make use of pass or another alternative (such as any implementation of the freedesktop.org Secret Service feature). Installation and configuration of pass or other alternatives is beyond the scope of this article; consult the documentation for pass or your specific OS distribution help pages.

Note that if -format json is used on this command, Boundary will not save the token to the system password store. In this case, the authentication information will only be printed to your terminal in JSON format. You can use the BOUNDARY_TOKEN environment variable or -token flag to provide the token in subsequent commands.

Boundary Desktop can be used to connect to HCP Boundary.

To get started with Boundary Desktop:

1. Install Boundary Desktop.
2. Enter your HCP Boundary instance’s Cluster URL.
3. Enter the login name and password.

To authenticate using the Boundary desktop client, launch Boundary desktop client and connect to boundary to using your environment's Cluster URL.

You can find your environment’s Cluster URL In the HCP portal. Open the Boundary Overview page and click the copy icon in the Copy this into Boundary Desktop section. This copies your environment’s Boundary Cluster URL.

The admin username and password from instance creation can be used for initial setup. Once additional users have been created, they can also log in to HCP Boundary using the Boundary Desktop app.

You can also use these overrides to configure the Terraform provider for Boundary:

provider "boundary" {
    base_url             = "hcp-boundary-cluster-url"
    auth_method_id       = "auth-method-id"
    auth_method_username = "admin-username"
    auth_method_password = "admin-password"
}

To find your environment’s base_url:

1. In the HCP portal, open the Boundary Overview page.
2. Click the copy icon in the Copy this into Boundary Desktop section. This copies your environment’s Boundary Cluster URL.

To find your environment’s default auth_method_id:

1. In your HCP Boundary portal, click the Admin UI button.
2. Log in to the Admin Console by entering the admin username and password you created when you deployed the HCP Boundary instance, and click Authenticate.
3. Click Auth Methods.
4. Click the copy icon for the Password Auth Method ID