Duration string format

[!IMPORTANT]
Documentation Update: Product documentation, which were located in this repository under /website, are now located in hashicorp/web-unified-docs, colocated with all other product documentation. Contributions to this content should be done in the web-unified-docs repo, and not this one. Changes made to /website content in this repo will not be reflected on the developer.hashicorp.com website.

Vault uses a unique duration string format as part of its configuration and APIs. This format is used throughout Vault wherever durations are provided. For example, telemetry configuration contains various options using this format, such as usage_gauge_period, which is the interval of collection for high-cardinality usage data.

How it works

A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with an optional fraction and an optional unit suffix. If no unit is given, we interpret the numbers as seconds.

Valid time units are:

ns Nanoseconds
us (or µs): Microseconds
ms: Milliseconds
s: Seconds
m: Minutes
h: Hours
d: Days

Examples

Example values could be:

100 (One hundred seconds, equivalent to 100s)
60h (Sixty hours)
1.5h (One and a half hours)
50d (Fifty days)
100ms (One hundred milliseconds)
50ns (Fifty nanoseconds)