Environment, Configuration & Security

A ConfigMap stores non-confidential configuration data as key-value pairs, letting you decouple environment-specific config from container images. Pods consume it as env vars, command-line args, or files in a volume.

Use kubectl create configmap <name> --from-literal=key=value, repeating --from-literal for each pair, e.g. kubectl create configmap app --from-literal=COLOR=blue --from-literal=MODE=prod.

--from-file=path adds a key (defaulting to the filename) whose value is the file's contents. --from-file=mydir adds one key per file in the directory. You can rename the key with --from-file=key=path.

--from-env-file=file reads a file of KEY=VALUE lines and creates one ConfigMap key per line (each line becomes a separate data entry), unlike --from-file which stores the whole file under one key.

--from-file stores the entire file content as a single value under one key (the filename); --from-env-file parses the file's KEY=VALUE lines into multiple distinct keys in the ConfigMap.

The data field holds key-value pairs where values are UTF-8 strings. Binary (non-UTF-8) content goes under binaryData as base64-encoded values.