Create your Bitwarden account

Lesson outcome

You will have a Bitwarden organization with Secrets Manager enabled, ready for the BWS CLI setup in the next lesson.

Why this matters in an agency

Agency owners store credentials everywhere — in browser autofill, in text files on the desktop, in Slack DMs, pasted into email drafts. Every one of those is a security liability and an operational headache. When you need to rotate an API key (and you will), you should change it in one place and have every tool that uses it pick up the new value automatically. That is what BWS does. It is not a password manager for your browser. It is a secrets vault for your tools and servers.

Inputs, tools, and prerequisites

An email address and a credit card. BWS requires a Bitwarden organization plan with the Secrets Manager add-on. If you already have a Bitwarden account, you may need to upgrade.

Step-by-step walkthrough

Create your Bitwarden account

Go to bitwarden.com and create an account if you do not already have one. Use a strong master password. Write it down and store it somewhere physically secure. If you lose your master password, you lose access to everything in Bitwarden. There is no recovery.

Create an organization

After logging in, you need an organization. An organization in Bitwarden is a container that can hold both regular password vault items and secrets for your tools. Navigate to the organizations section and create a new organization. Give it your company name.

You need a plan that includes Secrets Manager. Bitwarden's Teams plan supports it. Select the plan and enable the Secrets Manager add-on during checkout. The cost is modest — a few dollars per month — and it is the only ongoing cost for this part of the stack.

Enable Secrets Manager

Once your organization exists, go to the organization settings and confirm Secrets Manager is enabled. You should see a "Secrets Manager" section in the left sidebar when viewing your organization. If you do not see it, check your plan and make sure the add-on is active.

Create a project

Inside Secrets Manager, create a project. Think of a project as a folder for related secrets. Call it something descriptive — "agency-stack" or your company name. You will store all the credentials for your operator stack in this project.

Understand the model

Bitwarden Secrets Manager has three layers:

Secrets are the actual credentials — an API key, a password, a token. Each secret has a name, a value, and an optional note.

Projects group related secrets. You might have one project for your agency stack, another for a specific client's tools, another for a particular application.

Machine accounts are identities for your tools and servers. When you install the BWS CLI on your VPS later, it authenticates as a machine account, not as you personally. This means you can give the VPS access to only the secrets it needs without exposing everything in your vault.

You do not need to understand every detail right now. The important concept is: secrets go into BWS, and tools retrieve them through machine accounts.

Failure modes and verification checks

The most common failure is creating a Bitwarden account but not enabling the Secrets Manager add-on. Without it, you cannot create machine accounts or use the BWS CLI. Another failure is skipping the organization step — Secrets Manager only works within an organization, not on personal accounts.

Verification: log into Bitwarden, navigate to your organization, and confirm you can see the Secrets Manager section with your project listed inside it.

Implementation checklist

• Create a Bitwarden account (or log in to an existing one).
• Create an organization with a plan that supports Secrets Manager.
• Enable the Secrets Manager add-on.
• Create a project inside Secrets Manager.
• Confirm you can see the project in the Secrets Manager section.

Immediate next action

Move to the next lesson to install the BWS CLI and store your first secret.

Exercise

Create a test secret inside your project using the Bitwarden web interface. Name it "test-secret" and give it a value like "hello-from-bitwarden." You will retrieve this secret from the command line in the next lesson. This is practice creating a secret through the web UI before you move to the CLI.