Environment Management on Skaffold

Load environment variables from a file

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In Skaffold, a skaffold.env file can be defined in the project root directory to specify environment variables that Skaffold will load into the process. This provides a more organized and manageable way of setting environment variables, rather than passing them as command line arguments.

The skaffold.env file should be in the format of KEY=value pairs, with one pair per line. Skaffold will automatically load these variables into the environment before running any commands.

Local Cluster

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skaffold supports fast deployments to supported locally-hosted clusters, such as minikube and Docker Desktop, by loading images directly into the cluster. Loading images is typically much faster than the roundtrip required to push an image to a remote registry and then for the cluster to pull that image again.

Auto detection

Skaffold’s heuristic to detect local clusters is based on the Kubernetes context name set on kubectl. You can find your the current context name by running:

Image Repository Handling

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Often, a Kubernetes manifest (or skaffold.yaml) makes references to images that push to registries that we might not have access to. Modifying these individual image names manually is tedious, so Skaffold supports automatically prefixing these image names with a registry specified by the user. Using this, any project configured with Skaffold can be run by any user with minimal configuration, and no manual YAML editing!

This is accomplished through the default-repo functionality, and can be used one of three ways:

Profiles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skaffold profiles allow you to define build, test and deployment configurations for different contexts. Different contexts are typically different environments in your app’s lifecycle, like Production or Development.

You can create profiles in the profiles section of skaffold.yaml.

For a detailed discussion on Skaffold configuration, see Skaffold Concepts and skaffold.yaml References.

Profiles (`profiles`)

Each profile has six parts:

Name (name): The name of the profile
Build configuration (build)
Test configuration (test)
Deploy configuration (deploy)
Patches (patches)
Activation (activation)

Once a profile is activated, the specified build, test and deploy configuration in it will be laid onto, but won’t completely replace, the build, test and deploy sections declared in the main section of skaffold.yaml. The build, test and deploy configuration in the profiles section use the same syntax as the build, test and deploy sections of skaffold.yaml; for more information, see Builders, Testers, Deployers and you can always refer to skaffold.yaml reference for an overview of the syntax. Alternatively, you can override the main configuration with finer grained control using patches.

Kube-context Activation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When interacting with a Kubernetes cluster, just like any other Kubernetes-native tool, Skaffold requires a valid Kubernetes context to be configured. The selected kube-context determines the Kubernetes cluster, the Kubernetes user, and the default namespace. By default, Skaffold uses the current kube-context from your kube-config file.

You can override this default one of two ways:

--kube-context flag
```
skaffold dev --kube-context <myrepo>
```
Specify deploy.kubeContext configuration in skaffold.yaml
```
deploy:
  kubeContext: minikube
```

The CLI flag always takes precedence over the config field in the skaffold.yaml.

Templated Fields

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skaffold allows for certain fields in the config to be templated via the Go text/template package. Environment variables and certain special values computed by Skaffold (see below) are available in the templating context (defined as “dot” or .).

Go templates are quite powerful, including control flow, arguments, pipelining and variables. Predefined functions in the standard library are complemented in Skaffold by the Sprig template function library.

build:
  tagPolicy:
    envTemplate:
      template: "{{.FOO}}"
  artifacts:
  - image: gcr.io/k8s-skaffold/example

Suppose the value of the FOO environment variable is v1, the image built will be gcr.io/k8s-skaffold/example:v1.

Environment Management on Skaffold

Load environment variables from a file

Local Cluster

Auto detection

Image Repository Handling

Profiles

Profiles (profiles)

Kube-context Activation

Templated Fields

Profiles (`profiles`)