kubernetes liveliness is un-authorized - spring

Question

I am trying to define a livenessProbe by passing the value of httpheader as secret. but I am getting un-authorized 401.
- name: mycontainer
image: myimage
env:
- name: MY_SECRET
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: actuatortoken
key: token
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /test/actuator/health
port: 9001
httpHeaders:
- name: Authorization
value: $MY_SECRET
My secret as follows:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: actuatortoken
type: Opaque
stringData:
token: Bearer <token>
If I pass the same with actual value as below... it works as expected
- name: mycontainer
image: myimage
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /test/actuator/health
port: 9001
httpHeaders:
- name: Authorization
value: Bearer <token>
Any help is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

What you have will put the literal string $MY_SECRET as the Authorization header which won't work.
You don't want to put the actual value of the secret in your Pod/Deployment/whatever YAML since you don't want plaintext credentials in there.
3 options I can think of:
a) change your app to not require authentication for the /test/actuator/health endpoint;
b) change your app to not require authentication when the requested host is 127.0.0.1 and update the probe configuration to use that as the host;
c) switch from an HTTP probe to a command probe and write the curl/wget command yourself
Answer is being posted as Community wiki as it's from Amit Kumar Gupta comments.