Access secrets as environment variables in Kubernetes

Question

I'm using Secrets as an environmental variable and I was wondering how you would call the secret in the client side of my application? I'm running a Node.js application and want to use the Secrets environmental variable. I would normally call my environment variables by doing process.env.VARIABLE_NAME locally since I have an env file, but I know that it's not the same for a secret as environmental variable when deployed onto Kubernetes.

Could anybody help me with this? Thanks!

Answer 1

The environment variable created by secret will read as eny other environment variable passed to pod.

So if you create a secret, for example:

kubectl create secret generic user --from-literal=username=xyz

and pass it to the pod:

env:
- name: USERNAME
  valueFrom:
    secretKeyRef:
      name: user
      key: username

It will be passed to the pod as environment variable. You can check it by executing printenv USERNAME in the pod and output will be similar to this:

kubectl exec -it secret-env -- printenv USERNAME
xyz

Multiple secrets can be passed to the pod as environment variables.

Answer 2

After days of figuring out how to use Secrets as an environmental variable, I figured out how to reference it in my nodejs application!

Before I was doing the normal way of calling environmental variables, process.env.VARIABLE_NAME , but that did not work for me when I had Secrets as an environment variable. In order to get the value of the variable, I had to do process.env.ENVIRONMENTAL_VARIABLES_USERNAME in my Javascript file and that worked for me! Where ENVIRONMENTAL_VARIABLES is the name and USERNAME is the key : Refer to my other question for clarification: Environmental variables returning undefined for Kubernetes deployment

Not sure if this will help anyone else but this is how I managed to access my Secrets in my nodejs application!