Using Secrets

Secrets work very similarly to ConfigMaps, except that they are stored as encoded text (specifically, Base64) instead of plaintext.

Creating a Secret is therefore very similar to creating a ConfigMap, with a few key differences. For starters, creating a Secret imperatively will automatically Base64-encode the data in the Secret. First, let's look at creating a Secret imperatively from a pair of files.

From files

First, let's try creating a Secret from a file (this also works with multiple files). We can do this using the kubectl create command:

> echo -n 'mysecretpassword' > ./pass.txt
> kubectl create secret generic my-secret --from-file=./pass.txt

This should result in the following output:

secret "my-secret" created

Now, let's see what our Secret looks like using kubectl describe:

> kubectl describe secrets/db-user-pass

This command should result in the following output:

Name:  ...