Chainguard Container for sealed-secrets-controller

A Kubernetes controller and tool for one-way encrypted Secrets, enabling safe GitOps-friendly secret management.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/sealed-secrets-controller:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Sealed Secrets Controller Chainguard image is comparable to the official Sealed Secrets Controller image from Docker Hub.

Getting Started

Sealed Secrets is typically used alongside GitOps workflows to safely manage encrypted Kubernetes Secrets.

Sealed Secrets is designed to run as a native Kubernetes controller.

Running on Kubernetes

To deploy sealed secrets with the Chainguard image, create a values.yaml file with the image information - such as:

image:
  registry: cgr.dev
  repository: ORGANIZATION/sealed-secrets-controller
  tag: latest

Then install the controller using Helm:

helm repo add sealed-secrets https://bitnami-labs.github.io/sealed-secrets
helm install sealed-secrets sealed-secrets/sealed-secrets \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --create-namespace \
  -f values.yaml

This deploys the Sealed Secrets controller in the kube-system namespace using the specified image. This is the default namespace that kubeseal tool for encrypting secrets is expected, so changing the namespace will also require providing --controller-namespace argument to kubeseal whenever encrypting a secret.

Encrypting Secrets

To encrypt a secret, use the kubectl to create a Kubernetes Secret YAML file (unless you already have it) and then use kubeseal CLI tool to encrypt it. Such as:

kubectl create secret generic \
  --namespace default mysecret \
  --dry-run=client \
  --from-literal=password=supersecret \
  -o yaml >secret.yaml

kubeseal <secret.yaml -o yaml >sealedsecret.yaml

This generates a SealedSecret that can be safely committed to version control.

Applying Sealed Secrets

Once encrypted, apply the SealedSecret to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f mysealedsecret.yaml

The controller will decrypt it and create the actual Kubernetes Secret.

Documentation and Resources

Please refer to the upstream documentation for more details.

For configuration options and full documentation, refer to the Sealed Secrets Helm Chart on Artifact Hub.

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.