Cannot use harbor robot account ImagePullBackOff pull access denied

This post is mainly about harbor robot accounts.

Robot accounts are accounts used to run automated operations and have no access to the frontend. The account to use in your continuous integration or k8s registry secrets.

You create a robot account by going to:
Project -> Robot Accounts -> New Robot Account

The Problem $

Harbor forces the username of the robot account to be: robot$<account_name>.

The robot$ prefix makes it easily distinguishable from a normal Harbor user account

For a rancher robot:

robot$rancher

When adding that secret in kubernetes (via rancher) I get:

Error: ImagePullBackOff

When I save the username as robot$rancher as a gitlab environment variable. It does not store anything after the $ sign.

$ echo $HARBOR_USERNAME
robot

Doing a 1 line login does not work:

echo -n $HARBOR_PASSWORD | docker login -u "robot$gitlab_portal" --password-stdin $HARBOR_REGISTRY

however, doing it with this method does:

docker login $HARBOR_REGISTRY
username: ...
password: ...

The username seems to be the issue:

$ export HARBOR_USERNAME="robot$gitlab_portal"
$ echo $HARBOR_USERNAME
robot

The Fix

In this post one user suggested quoting the password:

docker login  -u '' -p ''

that worked. So in your gitlab ci file you can do:

echo -n $HARBOR_PASSWORD | docker login -u 'robot$gitlab_portal' --password-stdin $HARBOR_REGISTRY

https://github.com/goharbor/harbor/issues/9553