docker - 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?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56909180/decoding-kubernetes-secret

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.

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