Vault Secret as an External Secret

This guide to help people who are new to Vault create a Kubernetes Secret through Vault

There are two ways to use Vault Secret:

• Adding the annotations
• Use External Secret Operator

Source: external-secrets.io

I used the second step in this article because I used ArgoCD before and wanted to visualize all the resources I created.

Walkthrough

Create a Secret for the Vault token

kubectl create secret generic vault-token --from-literal=token=<token>

or

echo -n "token" | base64

apiVersion: v1
data:
  token: <Encoded Vault Token>
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: vault-token
type: Opaque

Install External Secrets using Helm

helm repo add external-secrets <https://charts.external-secrets.io>
helm install external-secrets external-secrets/external-secrets

SecretStore

Create secret-store.yaml file

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: secret-store
spec:
  provider:
    vault:
      server: http://<serverAddresss>:<port>
      path: <path> ----- see the picture above
      version: "<version>" ---- See the version near the path above
      auth:
        tokenSecretRef:
          name: vault-token
          key: token

ExternalService

Create external-secret.yaml file

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: external-secret
spec:
  refreshInterval: 5m  ------ Time for fetching new values
  secretStoreRef:
    name: secret-store  ------- Secret Store Name 
    kind: SecretStore
  target:
    name: secret-to-be-created   --------- Secret Name
    creationPolicy: Owner
  dataFrom:
  - extract:
      key: "<key>"  ------- See the picture above

It will automatically get all values from Vault Secret and create a new secret if it does not exist.

Preferences

HashiCorp Vault

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English is not my first language, and I am not good at it, but I want to improve and enhance my English every day. Writing a blog is the best way I have chosen. Please let me know if there is anything confusing because of my English.