Decoding Kubernetes secret

Question

I inherited a Kubernetes/Docker setup, and I accidentally crashed the pod by changing something relating to the DB password.

I am trying to troubleshoot this.

I don't have much Kubernetes or Docker experience, so I'm still learning how to do things.

The value is contained inside the db-user-pass credential I believe, which is an Opaque type secret.

I'm describing it:

kubectl describe secrets/db-user-pass Name:         db-user-pass Namespace:    default Labels:       <none> Annotations:  <none>  Type:  Opaque  Data ==== password:  16 bytes username:  13 bytes 

but I have no clue how to get any data from this secret. The example on the Kubernetes site seems to assume I'll have a base64 encoded string, but I can't even seem to get that. How do I get the value for this?

Answer 1

You can use kubectl get secrets/db-user-pass -o yaml or -o json where you'll see the base64-encoded username and password. You can then copy the value and decode it with something like echo <ENCODED_VALUE> | base64 -D (Mac OS X).

A more compact one-liner for this:

kubectl get secrets/db-user-pass --template={{.data.password}} | base64 -D 

and likewise for the username:

kubectl get secrets/db-user-pass --template={{.data.username}} | base64 -D 

Note: on GNU/Linux, the base64 flag is -d, not -D.