The other day I wanted to apply some configurations of Hashicorp Vault in a pipeline to automate some operations but Vault was a private deployment in a Kubernetes cluster. I was a bit lazy (not recommended) and also curious about this new (not anymore) trend which is ChatGPT! 🙂 So, here is my conversation and it worked. It’s not complicated but was helpful.

“I want to access an internal kubernetes service endpoint in a script. In specific, we have hashicorp vault inside kubernetes. I want to have a script that port forward to this service and then I use my local endpoint to run a couple of commands using ‘vault cli’ in the same script. can you please give me an example script?”

and the answer:

Certainly! Here’s an example script that demonstrates how you can port forward to a Kubernetes service endpoint and use the HashiCorp Vault CLI to run commands:

#!/bin/bash

# Port forward to the Vault UI service
kubectl port-forward -n hashicorp service/vault-ui 8200:8200 &
sleep 5 # Wait for port forwarding to be established

# Set the Vault endpoint to the local forwarded address
export VAULT_ADDR="http://127.0.0.1:8200"

# Authenticate to Vault (assuming token-based authentication)
export VAULT_TOKEN="your_vault_token"

# Run Vault CLI commands
vault status
vault secrets list

# Stop the port forwarding
kill %1