Working with secrets in the oc terminal can speed up work for routine tasks. In this blog post, we review sample command to perform these typical tasks on a secret:

• create a secret
• view the secret
• back up the secret
• update/change the secret
• restore the secret

Create a secret

First, we create a secret called mysecret1 to work with in the rest of the samples.

oc create secret generic mysecret1 --from-literal=username=myuser1 --from-literal=password=mypwd1
secret/mysecret1 created

View the secret

Now we can view the contents of the secret right at the terminal with the following command:

oc extract secret/mysecret1 --to=-
# password
mypwd1
# username
myuser1

Please note that this command decrypts the secret key values. Do not run it in front of other people or on a remote session on secrets with data that should not be shared.

Back up the secret

We can back up secret data to the file system with the following command:

Update/change the secret

We can update the secret data with the following command, for example:

oc patch secret mysecret1 -p '{"data":{"password": "'$(echo "mypwd2" | base64)'"}}' 

The command above updates the value of the password key. In other words, we change the password from mypw12" to mypwd2".

It is possible to update multiple key values at once, and to add new key/value pairs. For example:

oc patch secret mysecret1 -p '{"data":{"password": "'$(echo "mypwd3" | base64)'", "accountname": "'$(echo "myaccount1" | base64)'" }}' 

In the command above, we updated the password key value again, and also added a new key "accountname" with the value of "myaccount1".

We can verify the results by viewing the secret:

oc extract secret/mysecret1 --to=-
# accountname
myaccount1
# password
mypwd3
# username
myuser1

Restore the secret

We must delete the secret first. Then, we can use the backup we generated to restore the secret with its original data.