NetHSM

This documentation describes the NetHSM software and hardware.

The NetHSM software can be either used on the NetHSM hardware, or as a Docker container. This documentation only covers the Docker container in the Integration chapter.

The NetHSM software features a REST API to perform installation, administration and operational tasks. The recommended way to use the REST API is through the nitropy tool. Alternatively curl can be used to send HTTP requests to the REST API.

If you obtained a new NetHSM hardware, please refer to the chapter Getting Started first. In case you want to restore a backup of a NetHSM, please refer to the chapter Restore.

Important

If you use a NetHSM instance with a self-signed certificate, for example using the Docker container, you will have to instruct nitropy or curl to ignore the validity of the certificate. For nitropy use the option --no-verify-tls and for curl use the option --insecure/-k to skip the certificate check.

Note

The examples in this documentation use the environment variable NETHSM_HOST, which contains the IP address or URL of the NetHSM. On a Unix shell the variable can be set with the following command.

$ export NETHSM_HOST="<URL-or-IP-address>"