Keyring is a password management system available in OpenStack. You can install it using the following command: $ pip install keyring Keyring is used only if --os-use-keyring is specified or if the environment variable OS_USE_KEYRING=true is defined. A user specifies their username and password credentials to interact with OpenStack, using any client command. These credentials can be specified using various mechanisms, namely, the environment variable, or command line argument. It is not safe to specify the password using either of these methods. For example, when you specify your password using the command-line client with the --os-password argument, anyone with access to your computer can view it in plain text with the ps field. To avoid storing the password in plain text, you can prompt for the OpenStack password interactively. Then, the keyring can store the password and the user can safely retrieve it from their keyring. The encrypted password is stored in the ~/.openstack-keyring.cfg file.