Druid needs some passwords for accessing various secured systems like metadata store, Key Store containing server certificates etc.
All these passwords have corresponding runtime properties associated with them, for example `druid.metadata.storage.connector.password` corresponds to the metadata store password.
By default users can directly set the passwords in plaintext for these runtime properties, for example `druid.metadata.storage.connector.password=pwd` sets the metadata store password
to be used by Druid to connect to metadata store to `pwd`. Apart from this, users can use environment variables to get password in following way -
Environment variable password provider provides password by looking at specified environment variable. Use this in order to avoid specifying password in runtime.properties file.
|`variable`|String|environment variable to read password from|Yes|
However, many times users may want their own way to optionally securely fetch password during runtime of the Druid process.
Druid allows this by users to implement their own `PasswordProvider` interface and create a Druid extension to register this implementation at Druid process startup.
Please have a look at "Adding a new Password Provider implementation" on this [page](../development/modules.html) to learn more.
To use this implementation, simply set the relevant password runtime property to something similar as was done for Environment variable password provider like -