ITithkuil·Jul 21, 2023
Yeah documentation is hard and I'm guilty (as a former maintainer of SealedSecrets)
SealedSecrets was designed with "write only" secrets in mind.
Turns out a lot of people need to access the current secrets because they need to update a part of a "composite" secret.
There are two kinds of "composite" secrets, one easy and one harder, but if you don't know how to do it, even the easier is hard:
1. Secret with multiple data "items" (also called keys in K8s Secret jargon but that's confusing when there is encryption involved). I.e. good old "data":{"foo": "....", "bar": "..."}
2. Secrets where data within one item is actually a config file with cleartext and secrets mixed up in one single string (usually some JSON or YAML or TOML)
Case 1 is "easy" to deal with once you realize that sealed secrets files are just text files and you can just ma
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nually merge and update encryoted data items. We even created a "merge" and some "raw" encryption APIs to make that process a little less "copy pasta" but it's still hard to have a good UX that works for everyone.
Case 2 is harder. We did implement a data templating feature that allows you to generate a config file via a go-template that keeps the cleartext parts in clear and uses templating directives to inject the secret parts where you want (referencing the encrypted the items)
The main problem with case 2 is that it's undocumented.
The feature landed in 2021:
https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets/pull/580
I noticed that people at my current $dayjob used sealed secrets for years and it took me a while to understand that the reason they hated it was that they didn't know about that fundamental feature.
And how to blame them!? It's still undocumented!
In my defense I spent so much effort before and after I left VMware to lobby so that the project got the necessary staffing so it wouldn't die of bitrot that I didn't have much time left to work on documentation. Which is a bit said and probably just an excuse :-)
That said, I'm happy that the project is alive and the current maintainers are taking care of it against the forces of entropy. Perhaps some doc work would be useful too. Unfortunately I don't have time for now.