Sharing secret across namespaces

Question

Secret API objects reside in a namespace. They can only be referenced by pods in that same namespace. Basically, you will have to create the secret for every namespace.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/secret/#details

They can only be referenced by pods in that same namespace. But you can just copy secret from one name space to other. Here is a example of copying localdockerreg secret from default namespace to dev:

kubectl get secret localdockerreg --namespace=default --export -o yaml | kubectl apply --namespace=dev -f -

###UPDATE### In Kubernetes v1.14 --export flag is deprecated. So, the following Command with -oyaml flag will work without a warning in forthcoming versions.

kubectl get secret localdockerreg --namespace=default -oyaml | kubectl apply --namespace=dev -f -

or below if source namespace is not necessarily default

kubectl get secret localdockerreg --namespace=default -oyaml | grep -v '^\s*namespace:\s' | kubectl apply --namespace=dev -f -

The accepted answer is correct: Secrets can only be referenced by pods in that same namespace. So here is a hint if you are looking to automate the "sync" or just copy the secret between namespaces.

Automated (operator)

For automating the share or syncing secret across namespaces use ClusterSecret operator:

https://github.com/zakkg3/ClusterSecret

Using sed:

kubectl get secret <secret-name> -n <source-namespace> -o yaml \
| sed s/"namespace: <source-namespace>"/"namespace: <destination-namespace>"/\
| kubectl apply -n <destination-namespace> -f -

Use jq

If you have jq, we can use the @Evans Tucker solution

kubectl get secret cure-for-covid-19 -n china -o json \
 | jq 'del(.metadata["namespace","creationTimestamp","resourceVersion","selfLink","uid"])' \
 | kubectl apply -n rest-of-world -f -

Secrets are namespaced resources, but you can use a Kubernetes extension to replicate them. We use this to propagate credentials or certificates stored in secrets to all namespaces automatically and keep them in sync (modify the source and all copies are updated). See Kubernetes Reflector (https://github.com/EmberStack/kubernetes-reflector).

The extension allows you to automatically copy and keep in sync a secret across namespaces via annotations:

On the source secret add the annotations:

 annotations:
   reflector.v1.k8s.emberstack.com/reflection-auto-enabled: "true"

This will create a copy of the secret in all namespaces. You can limit the namespaces in which a copy is created using:

reflector.v1.k8s.emberstack.com/reflection-allowed-namespaces: "namespace-1,namespace-2,namespace-[0-9]*"

The extension supports ConfigMaps and cert-manager certificates as well. Disclainer: I am the author of the Kubernetes Reflector extension.

--export is deprecated

sed is not the appropriate tool for editing YAML or JSON.

Here's an example that uses jq to delete the namespace and other metadata we don't want:

kubectl get secret cure-for-covid-19 -n china -o json \
 | jq 'del(.metadata["namespace","creationTimestamp","resourceVersion","selfLink","uid"])' \
 | kubectl apply -n rest-of-world -f -

Another option would be to use kubed, as recommended by the kind folks at Jetstack who gave us cert-manager. Here is what they link to.