Why is k8s_default not allowing us to alias all the different k8s_object fields?

[kovkev]

Hi bazelbuild/rules_k8s!

Thanks tons for this repository, I think it will be very useful for me.

I am looking to use Bazel alongside Kubernetes to run containers in remote instances (in my current case, it would be EC2 instances, but I don't want to necessarily stick to EC2 only).

My understanding of kubernetes is fairly low, and I have some confusion. I think this is the right place to ask.

My project looks like

/home/slackware/tgkj/WORKSPACE
/home/slackware/tgkj/app/BUILD

and other files..

In WORKSPACE, I use k8s_defaults to create a k8s_deploy:

k8s_defaults(
  # This becomes the name of the @repository and the rule
  # you will import in your BUILD files.
  name = "k8s_deploy",
  kind = "deployment",
  # This is the name of the cluster as it appears in:
  #   kubectl config view --minify -o=jsonpath='{.contexts[0].context.cluster}'
  cluster = "my-tgkj-cluster",
  context = "my-tgkj-context",
  namespace = "my-tgkj-namespace",
)

and I think that k8s_defaults is a way of creating a "k8s_object" rule type that has some fields already set. Like an alias. However, I find that only a subset of the "k8s_object" are available in the "k8s_default" rule.

I say this because I thought it would be nice to specify a /home/slackware/tgkj/kube.config for the kubeconfig of k8s_defaults so that all of the k8s_deploy rules that I would set up would use that configuration file.

I do not understand why we need to specify to kubectl what context to use. Why can't kubectl use a kube.config file at the root of the project instead? Also, why can't we specify to rules_k8s the kube.config file that kubectl should use?

I hope this makes sense.

Thank you!

kovkev

[smukherj1]

Hi @kovkev,

The k8s_object does have a kubeconfig argument that lets you specify the kubeconfig file. However, as you said, this is currently not possible via the k8s_defaults rule to conveniently set it for more than one k8s_object target.

If you would like this feature, feel free to send a PR adding the ability to specify a kubeconfig file to k8s_defaults and I'll be happy to review it.

Thank you for using rules_k8s.

[kovkev]

Strangely enough, I see kubeconfig here: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_k8s/blob/5648b17d5f9b612cc47031a6fa961e6752fe50e8/examples/hellogrpc/BUILD#L32