Automated Google Cloud Platform Authentication

Tutorial

If you have a containerized GCP app with a Kubernetes yaml, you can automatically add your credentials to all your deployed pods dynamically with this minikube addon. You just need to have a credentials file, which can be generated with gcloud auth application-default login. If you already have a json credentials file you want specify, use the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable.

  • Start a cluster:
  1. minikube start
  1. 😄  minikube v1.12.0 on Darwin 10.15.5
  2. ✨  Automatically selected the docker driver. Other choices: hyperkit, virtualbox
  3. 👍  Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
  4. 🔥  Creating docker container (CPUs=2, Memory=3892MB) ...
  5. 🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.18.3 on Docker 19.03.2 ...
  6. 🔎  Verifying Kubernetes components...
  7. 🌟  Enabled addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
  8. 🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube"
  • Enable the gcp-auth addon:
  1. minikube addons enable gcp-auth
  1. 🔎  Verifying gcp-auth addon...
  2. 📌  Your GCP credentials will now be mounted into every pod created in the minikube cluster.
  3. 📌  If you don't want credential mounted into a specific pod, add a label with the `gcp-auth-skip-secret` key to your pod configuration.
  4. 🌟  The 'gcp-auth' addon is enabled
  • For credentials in an arbitrary path:
  1. export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=<creds-path>.json
  2. minikube addons enable gcp-auth
  • Deploy your GCP app as normal:
  1. kubectl apply -f test.yaml
  1. deployment.apps/pytest created

Everything should work as expected. You can run kubectl describe on your pods to see the environment variables we inject.

As explained in the output above, if you have a pod you don’t want to inject with your credentials, all you need to do is add the gcp-auth-skip-secret label:

  1. apiVersion: apps/v1
  2. kind: Deployment
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: pytest
  5. spec:
  6.   selector:
  7.     matchLabels:
  8.       app: pytest
  9.   replicas: 2
  10.   template:
  11.     metadata:
  12.       labels:
  13.         app: pytest
  14.         gcp-auth-skip-secret: "true"
  15.     spec:
  16.       containers:
  17.       - name: py-test
  18.         imagePullPolicy: Never
  19.         image: local-pytest
  20.         ports:
  21.           - containerPort: 80

Refreshing existing pods

If you had already deployed pods to your minikube cluster before enabling the gcp-auth addon, then these pods will not have any GCP credentials. There are two ways to solve this issue.

  1. If you use a Deployment to deploy your pods, just delete the existing pods with kubectl delete pod <pod_name>. The deployment will then automatically recreate the pod and it will have the correct credentials.

  2. minikube can delete and recreate your pods for you, by running minikube addons enable gcp-auth --refresh. It does not matter if you have already enabled the addon or not.

Last modified May 26, 2021: add docs for —refresh (b507e221d)