Skaffold: Is there a way to deploy to files?

[lucasmpr]

I'm trying to create a CI/CD flow with kubernetes and skaffold. I still dont have a way to have the history of the deployed versions, or do a simple callback.

What I was thinking about is to export the tagged yaml generated by skaffold deploy to commit them and finally trigger the CD process.

Is there a way?

[balopat]

Thanks for opening this @lucasmpr - it might be interesting to explore this direction - it seems to me that it would require a skaffold render phase rather than deploy to file - as deploy is implicitly a "render" & "kubectl apply" operation. If there is a lot of interest we could expose this - for helm we could use helm template for the final deployables.

[lucasmpr]

1937 has a similar question.

I don't see another way to do GitOps inside skaffold without this step.

I can try to build something if you need me.

[reegnz]

I would welcome for skaffold to just dump the patched manifests without doing anything with it (no kubectl, no kustomize, no helm, just leave it to me).
I am doing GitOps with ArgoCD and I would definitely want skaffold to just dump the patched manifests somewhere predefined, so that I can commit them automatically if the version matches a given rule.

I'd like to achieve something similar to what flux does with watching docker repos, but instead of watching images and only patching images, I want updates to the manifests propagated to the deploy repo.

[cmeury]

Just ran into the same issue, would also love to see an option to only render manifests. Or move towards Helm v3 which is tiller-less anyway?

[wstrange]

Would also like to see a kustomize manifest output option. Could be the entire manifest, or optionally, a list of kustomize edit commands to "fix" up the images for deployment?

[alnr]

See this comment which comes close to what OP wants, but does not quite work fully yet.

[strikeout]

This is super important for tight integration into existing CI/CD pipelines.
Please implement a render stage or a custom_script deployer (like the build stage already has)

[balopat]

We are looking at implementing this feature this quarter for flows where we can.

[balopat]

I realized that this was already an issue opened in https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/skaffold/issues/1187 - closing this - we are going to track it in #1187