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In a Kubernetes Pod, Overriding a File using ConfigMap

adil
2 min readJul 31, 2023

Many applications don’t use environment variables but instead, use one or more config files.

However, it could be challenging to override an existing file by using ConfigMap.

I will walk through replacing an existing file in a pod. For the sake of simplicity, I will replace the /etc/host.conf file.

The config file on my computer:

➜ ~ cat host-config-file.txt
multi off

You may want to create a ConfigMap entry in an imperative way:

kubectl create configmap host-config-data --from-file=host-config-file.txt

But if you create the config map, in an imperative way, the local filename is assigned as the data key.

kubectl get configmaps host-config-data -o yaml
apiVersion: v1
data:
host-config-file.txt: |
multi off

Declarative way:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: host-config-data
data:
data_custom_key: |-
multi off

Create the config map:

➜ ~ kubectl create -f configmap.yml
configmap/host-config-data created
➜ ~ kubectl get configmaps host-config-data -o yaml
apiVersion: v1
data:
data_custom_key: multi off

Create the deployment file:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: memcached-server-deployment
spec:
replicas: 2
selector:
matchLabels:
cache: memcached
template:
metadata:
labels:
cache: memcached
spec:
containers:
- name: memcached-container
image: memcached:bullseye
volumeMounts:
- name: config-override
mountPath: /etc/host.conf
subPath: custom_path
volumes:
- name: config-override
configMap:
name: host-config-data
items:
- key: data_custom_key
path: custom_path

I used a different word for each segment so you can distinguish which parts are related to each other.

Result:

kubectl exec -it memcached-server-deployment-67858696f7-b72vn -- /bin/bash
memcache@memcached-server-deployment-67858696f7-b72vn:/$ cat /etc/host.conf
multi off

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