I’ve been using Kubernetes a lot at work recently.
One of the many frustrating things about it is that the contents of secrets are
viewed and edited in Base64 encoding.
To add insult to injury, a lot of third-party software for Kubernetes store
configuration as secrets.
Viewing them is not so painful.
You can just pipe them to the base64 program, and you’re set.
But if you want to edit them, prepare for a decode-edit-encode dance every time.
One time I broke and spent a few hours working on a tool that just lets me
edit secrets in my favorite editor.
Today I’d like to show you my Base64 Kubernetes secret editor: keditb64
(mirrored on SourceHut and on Codeberg).
It retrieves and decodes any secret you point it at.
It then opens $EDITOR or vim and lets you edit it.
When you close the editor it encodes and writes contents back to the secret.
It also supports gzipped secrets with flag -z, because I needed that for
debugging Prometheus configuration at some point.
Let’s assume you have a secret defined by the following manifest:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
namespace: mynamespace
name: mysecret
data:
mykey: bXlzZWNyZXRjb250ZW50cw==
You can then call keditb64 to edit the value of mysecretkey like this:
keditb64 -n mynamespace mysecret mykey
Before that, I did this:
kubectl get secret mysecret -n mynamespace -o jsonpath='{.data.mykey}' | base64 -d,
copy, vim, paste, edit, copy, base64 -w0, paste, Ctrl+d, copy,
kubectl edit secret mysecret -n mynamespace, paste, save, close.
This process could probably be optimized without resorting to writing a new tool,
but I figured, I’d just write one that does exactly what I want and how I want.
Below are some real-world usage examples:
# Editing configuration of Alertmanager used with Prometheus Operator
keditb64 -n monitoring alertmanager-main alertmanager.yaml
# Viewing Prometheus configuration
keditb64 -p -z -n monitoring prometheus-k8s prometheus.yaml.gz
# Editing HTTP Basic Auth credentials
keditb64 -n apps auth-admin-docs users
# Editing TLS certificates
keditb64 -n monitoring blackbox-exporter-tls tls.crt
Although the tool already does everything I wanted it to, as always,
contributions are welcome.
If it proved useful to you, and you want to improve it, please send patches to
my public inbox (address below) or submit them on Codeberg.
See you next time!