use-git-https.md

Using Git over HTTPS

🛑 Upgrade Advisory

This documentation is for Flux (v1) which has reached its end-of-life in November 2022.

We strongly recommend you familiarise yourself with the newest Flux and migrate as soon as possible.

For documentation regarding the latest Flux, please refer to this section.

Instead of making use of Flux' capabilities to generate an SSH private key, or supplying your own, it is possible to set environment variables and use these in your --git-url argument to provide your HTTPS basic auth credentials without having to expose them as a plain value in your workload.

⚠ Note: Setting an HTTP(S) URL as --git-url will disable the generation of a private key and prevent the setup of the SSH keyring.

The variables must be escaped with $() for Kubernetes to pass the values to the Flux container, e.g. $(GIT_AUTHKEY). Read more about this Kubernetes feature.

Each of the username and password must be percent-encoded, otherwise the git URL may end up being invalid once they have been interpolated in. You can encode a string with Perl (assuming your token is in the environment variable TOKEN):

echo "$TOKEN" | perl -MURI::Escape -ne 'chomp;print uri_escape($_),"\n"'

1. Create a personal access token to be used as the GIT_AUTHKEY:

   • GitHub
   • GitLab
   • BitBucket

2. Create a Kubernetes secret with two environment variables and their respective values (replace <username> and <token/password>):

   kubectl create secret generic flux-git-auth --from-literal=GIT_AUTHUSER=<username> --from-literal=GIT_AUTHKEY=<token/password>

   this will result in a secret that has the structure:

   apiVersion: v1
   data:
     GIT_AUTHKEY: <base64 encoded token/password>
     GIT_AUTHUSER: <base64 encoded username>
   kind: Secret
   type: Opaque
   metadata:
     ...

3. Mount the Kubernetes secret as environment variables using envFrom and use them in your --git-url argument:

   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
     name: flux
   ...
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: flux
       envFrom:
       - secretRef:
           name: flux-git-auth
       args:
       # Replace `github.com/...` with your git repository 
       - --git-url=https://$(GIT_AUTHUSER):$(GIT_AUTHKEY)@github.com/fluxcd/flux-get-started.git
       ...