Passwords

The Password type can be use to define arguments that contain confidential data.

Password has two features to the value from being leaked to logs and console output.

• the value is exposed via the GetPassword() method instead of a property so serializers cannot access the value.
• ToString() will output ***** if there is a value, otherwise an empty string. This helps identify if a value was provided in logs but gives no indication how many characters, unless it happens to have 5 characters.

public class Api
{
    public void Download(
        string url, 
        [Option] string username, 
        [Option] Password password) { ... }
}

Warning

The best practice is not to require a password. This is only slightly more secure than using a string. For example, if the user provides a password as one of input arguments, it may be logged via parse token transformations

Prompting

When using Password with the built-in prompting features, password prompts will hide all characters.