kustomize targeting array items

how do you change the value of an array item with kustomize?

kustomize targeting array items

how do you change the value of an array item with kustomize?

kustomize array items

Kubernetes resources use quite a few lists/arrays in defining things. This leads to the question of how do you update the value of array items, especially if the order of items isn't stable?

Say we have the following manifest, and we want to change FIZZ=buzz to FIZZ=FUZZ in both deployments:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: example-deploy
spec:
  selectors:
    matchLabels:
      foo: bar
  template:
    metdata:
      labels:
        foo: bar
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: example-container
          env:
            - name: FIZZ
              value: buzz
            - name: HELLO
              value: world
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: example-deploy-2
spec:
  selectors:
    matchLabels:
      foo: bar
  template:
    metdata:
      labels:
        foo: bar
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: with-sidecar
        - name: example-container
          env:
            - name: HELLO
              value: world
            - name: FIZZ
              value: buzz

strategic merge patch

One option is to use a strategic merge patch. This uses extra data from the openapi definitions of resources to know that certain elements should be matched using certain keys. In this case, both the containers list and env list match using name.

Usually, a strategic merge patch is only applied on resources matching metadata.name, but kustomize has extended that to allow targeting on group, version, kind, name, namespace, labelSelector and annotationSelector with regexes.

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
resources:
  - original.yaml
patches:
  - patch: |
      apiVersion: apps/v1
      kind: Deployment
      metadata:
        name: placeholder
      spec:
        template:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: example-container
                env:
                  - name: FIZZ
                    value: FUZZ
    target:
      kind: Deployment

replacements

The other option makes use of replacements. This gives you more explicit control over how array items are targeted, but I havent thought of a good way to feed structured data in to it.

This example creates a temporary config map to hold that data that we later reference. The config.kubernetes.io/local-config: "true" annotation tells kustomize not to include it in the final output. Then we define a replacement, sourcing data from the configmap we just created, and targeting resources with the [key=value] item key selector.

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
resources:
  - original.yaml
configMapGenerator:
  - name: data-source
    options:
      disableNameSuffixHash: true
      annotations:
        config.kubernetes.io/local-config: "true"
    literals:
      - new-value=FUZZ
replacements:
  - source:
      name: data-source
      fieldPath: data.new-value
    targets:
      - select:
          kind: Deployment
        fieldPaths:
          - spec.template.spec.containers.[name=example-container].env.[name=FIZZ].value