Vault

The vault is the operating system's own secret store, and monkeys keeps nothing anywhere else. There is no file of monkeys's own to back up, leak or forget, and the desktop's own tools see everything monkeys stores.

What an item looks like

Each secret is one item carrying two attributes: service is monkeys, and account is <profile>/<KEY>, or <KEY> alone for a key with no profile, so a project's item reads foo.test/OPENROUTER_API_KEY. The label is monkeys: followed by the account. Deleting an item in the desktop's tools deletes it for monkeys.

On macOS that is a generic password in the login keychain. Search Keychain Access for monkeys, or ask for one by account:

security find-generic-password -s monkeys -a OPENROUTER_API_KEY
security find-generic-password -s monkeys -a foo.test/OPENROUTER_API_KEY

Items are created with kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlock, so a shell that starts while the screen is locked can still read them.

On Linux the same attributes go through secret-tool:

secret-tool lookup service monkeys account foo.test/OPENROUTER_API_KEY

The keychain prompt on macOS

A binary built from source carries an ad-hoc code signature, whose identity is a hash of the binary itself. A rebuild changes that identity, so the keychain may ask you to allow access once when the new build first reads an item the old one stored. The release builds are what brew and the install script give you.

The Secret Service on Linux

The Secret Service is a desktop session service. Over SSH or in a container there is usually no session bus and no secret daemon, and monkeys fails saying so. Machines like that want a different mechanism, not this one.