We will create the same secrets as in the previous section, only manually, by following these steps:

1. First, we need to encode the secrets to base64, as follows:

# encode the token to base64
# -w 0 options ensures that in case the string goes more 
# than 80 chars no column wrapping is done
echo '/x~Lhx
Az!,;.Vk%[#n+";9p%jGF6[' | base64 -w 0

You will get the following value:

L3h+TGh4XG5BeiEsOy5WayVbI24rIjs5cCVqR0Y2Wwo=

You might notice that this is the same value that was present when we got the yaml definition of the secret.

2. Similarly, for the url value, we can get the base64 encoded value, as shown in the following code block:

echo 'https://my-secret-url-location.topsecret.com' | base64 -w 0
aHR0cHM6Ly9teS1zZWNyZXQtdXJsLWxvY2F0aW9uLnRvcHNlY3JldC5jb20K

3. We can now create the secret definition manually; then, save the file as myfirstsecret.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: myapiurltoken
type: Opaque
data:
  url: aHR0cHM6Ly9teS1zZWNyZXQtdXJsLWxvY2F0aW9uLnRvcHNlY3JldC5jb20K
  token: L3h+TGh4XG5BeiEsOy5WayVbI24rIjs5cCVqR0Y2Wwo=

kind tells us that this is a secret; the name value is myapiurltoken, and type is Opaque (from Kubernetes' perspective, values are unconstrained key-value pairs). The data section has the actual data in the form of keys, such as url and token, followed by the encoded values.

4. Now we can create the secrets in the same way as any other Kubernetes resource by using the create command:

kubectl create -f myfirstsecret.yaml
kubectl get secrets
NAME                  TYPE              DATA   AGE
defau...              kubernetes.io/..   3      4d5h
myapi-url-token       Opaque             2      167m
myapiurltoken         Opaque             2      25m

5. You can double-check that the secrets are the same, by using kubectl get -o yaml secrets/myapiurltoken in the same way that we described in the previous section.