Using Git over HTTPS¶

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.

Note: 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.

Create a personal access token to be used as the GIT_AUTHKEY:
- GitHub
- GitLab
- BitBucket

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:
  ...

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
    ...