Quick guides:
Kustomize offers a plugin framework allowing people to write their own resource generators and transformers.
Write a plugin when changing generator options or transformer configs doesn't meet your needs.
-
A generator plugin could be a helm chart inflator, or a plugin that emits all the components (deployment, service, scaler, ingress, etc.) needed by someone's 12-factor application, based on a smaller number of free variables.
-
A transformer plugin might perform special container command line edits, or any other transformation beyond those provided by the builtin (
namePrefix
,commonLabels
, etc.) transformers.
Start by adding a generators
and/or transformers
field to your kustomization.
Each field accepts a string list:
generators: - relative/path/to/some/file.yaml - relative/path/to/some/kustomization - /absolute/path/to/some/kustomization - https://github.com/org/repo/some/kustomization transformers: - {as above}
The value of each entry in a generators
or
transformers
list must be a relative path to a
YAML file, or a path or URL to a kustomization.
This is the same format as demanded by the
resources
field.
YAML files are read from disk directly. Paths or URLs leading to kustomizations trigger an in-process kustomization run. Each of the resulting objects is now further interpreted by kustomize as a plugin configuration object.
A kustomization file could have the following lines:
generators:
- chartInflator.yaml
Given this, the kustomization process would expect
to find a file called chartInflator.yaml
in the
kustomization root.
This is the plugin's configuration file; it contains a YAML configuration object.
The file chartInflator.yaml
could contain:
apiVersion: someteam.example.com/v1
kind: ChartInflator
metadata:
name: notImportantHere
chartName: minecraft
The apiVersion
and kind
fields are
used to locate the plugin.
Thus, these fields are required. They are also required because a kustomize plugin configuration object is also a k8s object.
To get the plugin ready to generate or transform, it is given the entire contents of the configuration file.
For more examples of plugin configuration YAML, browse the unit tests below the plugins root, e.g. the tests for ChartInflator or NameTransformer.
Each plugin gets its own dedicated directory named
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kustomize/plugin
/${apiVersion}/LOWERCASE(${kind})
The default value of XDG_CONFIG_HOME
is
$HOME/.config
.
The one-plugin-per-directory requirement eases creation of a plugin bundle (source, tests, plugin data files, etc.) for sharing.
In the case of a Go plugin, it also
allows one to provide a go.mod
file for the
single plugin, easing resolution of package
version dependency skew.
When loading, kustomize will first look for an executable file called
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kustomize/plugin
/${apiVersion}/LOWERCASE(${kind})/${kind}
If this file is not found or is not executable,
kustomize will look for a file called ${kind}.so
in the same directory and attempt to load it as a
Go plugin.
If both checks fail, the plugin load fails the overall
kustomize build
.
Plugins are only used during a run of the
kustomize build
command.
Generator plugins are run after processing the
resources
field (which itself can be viewed as a
generator, simply reading objects from disk).
The full set of resources is then passed into the
transformation pipeline, wherein builtin
transformations like namePrefix
and
commonLabel
are applied (if they were specified
in the kustomization file), followed by the
user-specified transformers in the transformers
field.
The order specified in the transformers
field is
respected, as transformers cannot be expected to
be commutative.
Kustomize plugins do not run in any kind of kustomize-provided sandbox. There's no notion of "plugin security".
A kustomize build
that tries to use plugins but
omits the flag
--enable_alpha_plugins
will not load plugins and will fail with a warning about plugin use.
The use of this flag is an opt-in acknowledging the unstable (alpha) plugin API, the absence of plugin provenance, and the fact that a plugin is not part of kustomize.
To be clear, some kustomize plugin downloaded
from the internet might wonderfully transform
k8s config in a desired manner, while also
quietly doing anything the user could do to the
system running kustomize build
.
There are two kinds of plugins, exec and Go.
A exec plugin is any executable that accepts a single argument on its command line - the name of a YAML file containing its configuration (the file name provided in the kustomization file).
TODO: restrictions on plugin to allow the same exec plugin to be targetted by both the
generators
andtransformers
fields.
- first arg could be the fixed string
generate
ortransform
, (the name of the configuration file moves to the 2nd arg), or- or by default an exec plugin behaves as a tranformer unless a flag
-g
is provided, switching the exec plugin to behave as a generator.
- helm chart inflator - A generator that inflates a helm chart.
- bashed config map - Super simple configMap generation from bash.
- sed transformer - Define your unstructured edits using a plugin like this one.
- hashicorp go-getter - Download kustomize layes and build it to generate resources
A generator plugin accepts nothing on stdin
, but emits
generated resources to stdout
.
A transformer plugin accepts resource YAML on stdin
,
and emits those resources, presumably transformed, to
stdout
.
kustomize uses an exec plugin adapter to provide
marshalled resources on stdin
and capture
stdout
for further processing.
A generator exec plugin can adjust the generator options for the resources it emits by setting one of the following internal annotations.
NOTE: These annotations are local to kustomize and will not be included in the final output.
kustomize.config.k8s.io/needs-hash
Resources can be marked as needing to be processed by the internal hash transformer by including the needs-hash
annotation. When set valid values for the annotation are "true"
and "false"
which respectively enable or disable hash suffixing for the resource. Omitting the annotation is equivalent to setting the value "false"
.
If this annotation is set on a resource not supported by the hash transformer the build will fail.
Example:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: cm-test
annotations:
kustomize.config.k8s.io/needs-hash: "true"
data:
foo: bar
kustomize.config.k8s.io/behavior
The behavior
annotation will influence how conflicts are handled for resources emitted by the plugin. Valid values include "create", "merge", and "replace" with "create" being the default.
Example:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: cm-test
annotations:
kustomize.config.k8s.io/behavior: "merge"
data:
foo: bar
Be sure to read Go plugin caveats.
A .go
file can be a Go plugin if it declares
'main' as it's package, and exports a symbol to
which useful functions are attached.
It can further be used as a kustomize plugin if
the symbol is named 'KustomizePlugin' and the
attached functions implement the Configurable
,
Generator
and Transformer
interfaces.
A Go plugin for kustomize looks like this:
package main import ( "sigs.k8s.io/kustomize/v3/pkg/ifc" "sigs.k8s.io/kustomize/v3/pkg/resmap" ... ) type plugin struct {...} var KustomizePlugin plugin func (p *plugin) Config( ldr ifc.Loader, rf *resmap.Factory, c []byte) error {...} func (p *plugin) Generate() (resmap.ResMap, error) {...} func (p *plugin) Transform(m resmap.ResMap) error {...}
Use of the identifiers plugin
, KustomizePlugin
and implementation of the method signature
Config
is required.
Implementing the Generator
or Transformer
method allows (respectively) the plugin's config
file to be added to the generators
or
transformers
field in the kustomization file.
Do one or the other or both as desired.
- service generator - generate a service from a name and port argument.
- string prefixer - uses the value in
metadata/name
as the prefix. This particular example exists to show how a plugin can transform the behavior of a plugin. See theTestTransformedTransformers
test in thetarget
package. - date prefixer - prefix the current date to resource names, a simple example used to modify the string prefixer plugin just mentioned.
- secret generator - generate secrets from a toy database.
- sops encoded secrets - a more complex secret generator.
- All the builtin plugins. User authored plugins are on the same footing as builtin operations.
A Go plugin can be both a generator and a
transformer. The Generate
method will run along
with all the other generators before the
Transform
method runs.
Here's a build command that sensibly assumes the
plugin source code sits in the directory where
kustomize expects to find .so
files:
d=$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kustomize/plugin\
/${apiVersion}/LOWERCASE(${kind})
go build -buildmode plugin \
-o $d/${kind}.so $d/${kind}.go