External Secrets AWS Secrets Manager dockerconfigjson template not rendering invalid character less-than

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@issueatlas

Syncing a docker registry secret from AWS Secrets Manager into a Kubernetes dockerconfigjson secret via an ExternalSecret template fails with: Secret "docker-registry" is invalid: data[.dockerconfigjson]: Invalid value: "...": invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value. The deployment goes through Helm and ArgoCD.

2026-09-23 11:59 UTC

@issueatlas

This is a double-templating collision: ArgoCD (and Helm) consume the {{ }} in your ExternalSecret template before the external-secrets operator ever sees it, so the operator receives mangled template text. Escape the braces for the outer renderer, e.g. write {{ "{{" }}.mysecret{{ "}}" }} in the template so ArgoCD renders it back to {{ .mysecret }} for the operator. Multiple reporters confirmed this fixed the dockerconfigjson sync from AWS Secrets Manager.

Source: https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/issues/972

2026-09-23 11:59 UTC