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ConfigMaps - Setting ConfigMaps From The Oc CLI

The document discusses how to create and use ConfigMaps in OpenShift to provide configuration data and files to pods. It shows how to create ConfigMaps from the CLI, add them to deployments as environment variables or mounted volumes, and access the data from within pods.

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mailrobertb
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144 views

ConfigMaps - Setting ConfigMaps From The Oc CLI

The document discusses how to create and use ConfigMaps in OpenShift to provide configuration data and files to pods. It shows how to create ConfigMaps from the CLI, add them to deployments as environment variables or mounted volumes, and access the data from within pods.

Uploaded by

mailrobertb
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ConfigMaps - Setting ConfigMaps from the oc CLI

Jan 10, 2022


While preparing for EX280 I learned a lot about using the CLI to configure
Openshift resources. It’s always great learning to configure this stuff from the
CLI because it gives you so much power and (In my opinion) a lot more understanding
about how things work because you need to viluazie what you are doing in your head.
Also: “Writing is thinking” (Ahrens2017)1

FYI; This blog is written for OpenShift but for most command’s oc and kubectl are
interchangeable.

Understanding ConfigMaps and Secrets


In Kubernetes you can create ConfigMaps and Secrets to supply your pod’s with
“information”. ConfigMaps and Secret’s look a lot alike with the major difference
at this point being that Secrets encode (not encrypt) their values in base64

In this blog I’ll talk about creating ConfigMap’s and how to mount and use them.
The command’s for secrets look a lot like these but I’ll save that for some other
time.

Adding data to a pod using a ConfigMap


In this example we will supply a ENV key called “api_url” to a deployment. We will
also add a webserver config file to the deployment.

This will look like this:

Namespace
Deployment
Creates
Manages
Supplies Data
Supplies Data
ReplicaSet
Deployment
Pod
ConfigMap: application-env
ConfigMap: application-config
Preparing the environment
So, if not clear already, you can do this on you own cluster or local K3s setup. We
will use the bintami/nginx image as Deployment because it’s nice and easy

Creating the deployment


For this we will create a a new project and deploy the application with:

$ oc new-project configmaps-demo
$ oc new-app --name super-app --docker-image bitnami/nginx
This should resolve in a running nginx container called super-app:

$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 1/1 Running 0 8
Creating the ConfigMap’s
We will create 2 config maps for this example:

application-env containing api_url=https://api.amazing.com


application-config containing our simple string “I am your config”
We will create the application-env ConfigMap form the CLI with:

$ oc create configmap application-env \


--from-literal api_url=https://api.amazing.com
And we will create the application-config ConfigMap from a simple file containing
some string data:

$ echo "I am your config" > config.txt


$ oc create configmap application-config \
--from-file config.txt
Adding config maps using the CLI
Now for the magic 🎩. We will add both config maps to our app super-app using the oc
command line.

Adding the ConfigMap as ENV variables


You do this with the following command:

$ oc set env deployment/super-app \


--from configmap/application-env
This will provide the KeyPair as values to the container. There a two ways to see
the results.

Check the pod spec with


$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 1/1 Running 0 8
$ oc get pod super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 -o yaml | grep -A 4 -e 'env:'
- env:
- name: API_URL
valueFrom:
configMapKeyRef:
key: api_url
Connect to the pod and echo the ENV variables
$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 1/1 Running 0 8
$ oc rsh super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 bash
(pod) $ echo $API_URL
https://api.amazing.com
Adding the ConfigMap as file
This is done with a slightly longer command. The following wil create a volume for
the pod to mount and acces the files:

When mounting a volume to a pod all data on the mount path will be made
inaccessible. This means that any files present at /mount/config/application-config
will not show up in your pod

$ oc set volume deployment/super-app \


--add \
--type configmap \
--mount-path /mount/config/application-config \
--configmap-name application-config
This will map the ConfigMap to our pod using the new Volume. We can see the result
by connecting to the pod:

$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 1/1 Running 0 7m8s
$ oc rsh super-app-67b7c69cfb-v5rr7 bash
No we can cat the mounted file:

(pod) $ cat /mount/config/application-config/config.txt


I am your config
We can also see this mount in the yaml of our pod:

$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
super-app-79fc5bf5df-zsjlg 1/1 Running 0 12m
$ oc get pods super-app-79fc5bf5df-zsjlg -o yaml | grep mountPath -A 2
- mountPath: /mount/config/application-config
name: volume-qcxd4
- mountPath: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount
name: kube-api-access-wddx2
readOnly: true
ConfigMaps and multible keys
Please note that the config is being mounted as config.txt. This is because when we
created the ConfigMap from file we did not asigne the contents of the file to a
key. When you oc describe the config map you can see that the contents has been
“keyed” to config.txt:

$ oc describe configmaps application-config


Name: application-config
Namespace: configmaps-demo
Labels: <none>
Annotations: <none>

Data
====
config.txt:
----
I am your config
If we wanted to mount multible files we could add more key value pairs to a single
config map like:

$ echo "I am your users" > users.txt


$ echo "I am your list" > list.txt
$ oc create configmap application-config-multible \
--from-file config.txt \
--from-file users.txt \
--from-file list.txt
$ oc describe configmap application-config-multible
Name: application-config-multible
Namespace: configmaps-demo
Labels: <none>
Annotations: <none>

Data
====
config.txt:
----
I am your config

list.txt:
----
I am your list

users.txt:
----
I am your users

Events: <none>
And mount it to the pod (on a different path):

$ oc set volume deployment/super-app \


--add \
--type configmap \
--mount-path /mount/config/application-config-multible \
--configmap-name application-config-multible
Now from the pod you’ll see the files mounted to /mount/config/application-config-
multible:

(pod) $ ls -la /mount/config/application-config-multible


total 0
drwxrwsrwx. 3 root 1000150000 110 Jan 11 09:40 .
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 41 Jan 11 09:40 ..
drwxr-sr-x. 2 root 1000150000 57 Jan 11 09:40 ..2022_01_11_09_40_51.324279541
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 31 Jan 11 09:40 ..data -
> ..2022_01_11_09_40_51.324279541
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 17 Jan 11 09:40 config.txt -> ..data/config.txt
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 15 Jan 11 09:40 list.txt -> ..data/list.txt
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 16 Jan 11 09:40 users.txt -> ..data/users.txt
Wrapping up
So that’s it for now. As you can see we can use ConfigMap’s to supply pods with
different kinds of information. We can add ENV data and provide files to the pods
using a ConfigMap. You can use almost the same commands to add the data using
Secrets but I’ll cover that in another blog you can read about that here
https://blog.benstein.nl/posts/create-and-use-secrets-openshift/.

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