Get K8s secrets

In this guide, I assume the following:

• You have using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage K8s clusters
  • Although the steps to fetch the secrets would be same regardless of the technology behind your K8s clusters
• You have the following CLI tools installed:
  • AWS CLI v2 (if you are using EKS)
  • kubectl
  • jq

Here are the steps to fetch secrets from a K8s cluster:

1. Update kube.config file with the appropriate cluster name. The <profile-name> would be the name of the local aws profile. If you do not have a specific profile, you may skip it, and aws will pick up the default profile.

   aws --profile <profile-name> eks update-kubeconfig --name <cluster-name>

2. Verify if the k8s context was correctly updated. The above command should output the ARN of the EKS cluster

   kubectl config current-context

3. Fetch desired k8s secret and output in the form of JSON

   kubectl get secret <secret-name> -n <namespace> -o json

4. Pass the above output to jq for better deserialization

   kubectl get secret <secret-name> -n <namespace> -o json | jq -r .

5. Pass the encoded secret value to base64 to get the decoded value

   kubectl get secret <secret-name> -n <namespace> -o json | jq -r ."<key-1>"."<key-2>" | base64 -d