How to use kubernetes sealed secrets with helm templates

Question

I just came across the sealed secrets tool https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets for encrypting secrets in kubernetes with added benefits of being able to commit those to git

I am a bit disappointed that such a great tool did not address helm templates by default or as part of the official documentation. I mean for a tool like that, i am not sure if the developers thought of the different ways people use secrets in which helm charts is a great way where we use values template files for different environment.

Anyways here is my setup

secrets.yaml

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: demo-app
type: Opaque
data:
  ENV1: "{{ .Values.ENV1 | b64enc }}"
  ENV2: "{{ .Values.ENV2 | b64enc }}"
  ENV3: "{{ .Values.ENV3 | b64enc }}"

here are the values template files for DEV and PROD for example

values-dev.yaml

demo-app:
  name: demo-app
  replicaCount: 1
  image:
    repository: example/demo-app
    tag: latest
    pullPolicy: Always


# secrets
ENV1: 'dev_4rlmerl4om3o'
ENV2: 'dev_eom4om4odl4o'
ENV3: 'dev_38hdineoij4oj3onod4ncen3eiixnknnkejnslrmnomntrcoenkc'

values-prod.yaml

demo-app:
  name: demo-app
  replicaCount: 1
  image:
    repository: example/demo-app
    tag: 1.0.0
    pullPolicy: Always


# secrets
ENV1: 'prod_4rlmerl4om3o'
ENV2: 'prod_eom4om4odl4o'
ENV3: 'prod_38hdineoij4oj3onod4ncen3eiixnknnkejnslrmnomntrcoenkc'

Here is how i deploy the application

DEV

helm upgrade --install demo-app-dev --namespace team1 -f values-dev.yaml .

PROD

helm upgrade --install demo-app-prod --namespace team1 -f values-prod.yaml .

I am trying to use sealed secrets with this scenario but not able to figure out how to without changing my whole structure completely.

Answer 1

you can generate the values_{ENV}.yaml dynamically rather you maintain it and you can delete after the deployments. So next CICD/build will generate for different apps the same

Answer 2

If you want to use sealed secret with helm, you need to update the helm chart and create one new YAML template

apiVersion: bitnami.com/v1alpha1
kind: SealedSecret
metadata:
  name: mysecret
  namespace: mynamespace
spec:
  encryptedData:
    foo: "{{ .Values.ENV1 }}"

so the template will create the sealed secret from values.yaml and K8s secret will get auto-created as mentioned in the documentation of the sealed secrets.

For a different environment, you can generate the values_{ENV}.yaml file. use it as you are doing now with values-dev.yaml and values-prod.yaml

https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets#overview