Get Kubernetes Secrets With kubectl

Entering k8s get secrets options in the AI Command Suggestions will prompt a list of kubectl commands that can then quickly be inserted into your shell by doing CMD+ENTER.

Listing secrets in the YAML and JSON formats

By default, the output format of the kubectl get secrets command is a table. However, you can specify other formats, such as YAML or JSON using the -o flag (short for --output):

Where:

• output_format is one of yaml or json.

For example, the following command will output comprehensive details about all the Secrets in the YAML format:

Listing Secrets by name

To list one or more Secrets by name in your Kubernetes cluster, you can use the kubectl get secrets command as follows:

Where:

• secret_name… is a list of Secret names separated by a space character.

For example, the following command will output a table of information about the Secrets named mysecret1 and mysecret2:

Listing Secrets by label

Labels are key-value pairs attached to the Kubernetes objects that organize resources based on specific criteria.

To list Secrets based on a specific label, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the -l flag (short for --label):

Where:

• label is the key of the label.
• value is the value associated with the label.

For example, the following command will display all the Secrets labeled app=myapp:

Listing the labels of all Secrets

To view the labels associated with all the secrets at once, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the --show-label flag:

Upon execution, the above command will output an additional column showing any labels associated with secrets.

Listing Secrets by type

To list Secrets based on a specific type, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the --field-selector flag:

Where:

• The field_name is a JSONPath expression used for selecting a specific field.
• The field_value is the value for the specified field.

For example, this command will filter and display the list of all Secrets with type Opaque :

And this command will get the list of TLS Secrets via selecting the type kubernetes.io/tls:

Listing Secrets by namespace

In Kubernetes, namespaces provide a logical way to separate resources within an application.

To list all the Secrets in a specified namespace, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the -n flag (short for --namespace) as follows:

For example, this command will list all the Secrets in the myNamespace namespace.

Listing Secrets in all namespaces

To list Secrets across all namespaces, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the --all-namespaces flag:

Extracting Secrets information

To output specific field values of Secrets, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the -o flag combined with a JSONPath expression as follows:

Where:

• expression is a JSONPath expression

For example, this command will extract the key-value pairs of each label assigned to the Secret:

Where:

• .items[*] indicates to iterate over each Secret.
• .metadata specifies the Secret metadata.
• labels retrieves the label name from the metadata information.

Decoding the values of Secrets

By default, the data values of Secret objects are encoded in Base64, providing a protective measure to conceal their contents.

To decode and retrieve a specific value, you can use the kubectl get secrets command as follows:

Where:

• The secret_name is the name of a specific Secret.
• The field_name is the field name for which you want to get the value using the JSONPath expression.
• The | is a pipe symbol that redirects the output of one command to the input of another command.
• The base64 is a command that encodes or decodes data using the Base64 algorithm.
• The -d is an option used with base64 command for decoding the input data.

For example, this command will fetch the Secret object mysecret, extract the username value from it and decode it from Base64 to plain text:

Sorting the output of the kubectl get secrets command

To sort the output of the kubectl get secrets command based on a specific field, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the --sort-by flag:

Where:

• expression is a JSONPath expression.

For example, this command will display the list of all Secrets sorted by their names in ascending order:

Customizing the output of the kubectl get secrets command

To customize the output columns of the kubectl get secrets command, you can use the kubectl get secrets command with the -o custom-columns flag:

Where:

• custom_column_name is the name you want to assign to a column.
• expression is a JSONPath expression.

For example, this command will only output the NAME and TYPE columns populated with the values of the metadata.name and type properties:

Note that if specifying custom-columns becomes lengthy or if you plan to reuse the same column configurations frequently, you can opt for a template file as follows:

Where the myTemplate.txt file has the following content:

Describing secrets with additional information

To display additional information about the secrets, you can use the kubectl describe secrets command as follows:

Where:

• secret_name … is a list of Secrets names separated by a space indicator.

For example, this command will output details about the mysecret1 and mysecret2 Secrets, such as their associated labels, annotations, type, data size, and more.

To output details about all secrets in the cluster, execute the following command without specifying secret names: