Rotate the Administrator Password

April 6, 2025

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How to rotate the administrator password.

Password rotation is an essential part of maintaining high levels of security within a Couchbase cluster. For more information see the credential rotation concepts documentation.

Choosing and Preparing a New Password

The first step to rotating a password is to generate a new one. It’s recommended that you delegate this task to a dedicated tool that is good at this task. For the following demonstration we will use apg:

console
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$ apg -M SNCL -m 32 -n 1
MigdacalOn87scheav>odmagilEnhit9

When replacing secrets — for simplicity — we will do a straight swap, so need to base64 encode it:

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$ echo -n 'MigdacalOn87scheav>odmagilEnhit9' | base64
TWlnZGFjYWxPbjg3c2NoZWF2Pm9kbWFnaWxFbmhpdDk=

Updating the Administrator Secret

The administrator user secret is defined by the couchbaseclusters.spec.security.adminSecret attribute in a CouchbaseCluster resource:

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$ kubectl get couchbasecluster/cb-example -o json | jq .spec.security.adminSecret
"cb-example-auth"

Next, edit the secret:

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$ kubectl edit secret/cb-example-auth
# Please edit the object below. Lines beginning with a '#' will be ignored,
# and an empty file will abort the edit. If an error occurs while saving this file will be
# reopened with the relevant failures.
#
apiVersion: v1
data:
  password: cGFzc3dvcmQ= (1)
  username: QWRtaW5pc3RyYXRvcg==
kind: Secret
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2020-11-11T11:17:25Z"
  name: cb-example-auth
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "1890"
  selfLink: /api/v1/namespaces/default/secrets/cb-example-auth
  uid: 96350ef3-2548-4a7a-b4cc-1f074d0c1c09
type: Opaque

1	Replace the `password` data item with our new, base64 encoded value, save and quit from your editor.

Your resource should look like the following after editing:

yaml
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# Please edit the object below. Lines beginning with a '#' will be ignored,
# and an empty file will abort the edit. If an error occurs while saving this file will be
# reopened with the relevant failures.
#
apiVersion: v1
data:
  password: TWlnZGFjYWxPbjg3c2NoZWF2Pm9kbWFnaWxFbmhpdDk=
  username: QWRtaW5pc3RyYXRvcg==
kind: Secret
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2020-11-11T11:17:25Z"
  name: cb-example-auth
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "1890"
  selfLink: /api/v1/namespaces/default/secrets/cb-example-auth
  uid: 96350ef3-2548-4a7a-b4cc-1f074d0c1c09
type: Opaque

You can verify the change has been successfully made by consulting the logs:

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$ kubectl logs -f deployment/couchbase-operator
...
{"level":"info","ts":1605093846.9616146,"logger":"cluster","msg":"Rotating admin password","cluster":"default/cb-example"}

The Operator will also raise an event that can be monitored by an external client:

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$ kubectl describe couchbasecluster/cb-example
...
Events:
  Type    Reason                Age    From  Message
  ----    ------                ----   ----  -------
  Normal  AdminPasswordChanged  3m23s        The cluster admin password was changed