Kontemplate tips & tricks

Table of Contents

• Kontemplate tips & tricks
  • Update Deployments when ConfigMaps change
  • direnv & pass

Update Deployments when ConfigMaps change

Kubernetes does not currently have the ability to perform rolling updates of Deployments and other resource types when ConfigMap or Secret objects are updated.

It is possible to make use of annotations and templating functions in Kontemplate to force updates to these resources anyways.

For example:

# A ConfigMap that contains some configuration for your app
---
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: app-config
data:
  app.conf: |
    name: {{ .appName }}
    foo: bar

Now whenever the appName variable changes or we make an edit to the ConfigMap we would like to update the Deployment making use of it, too. We can do this by adding a hash of the parsed template to the annotations of the created Pod objects:

---
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: app
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        configHash: {{ insertTemplate "app-config.yaml" | sha256sum }}
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: app
          # Some details omitted ... 
          volumeMounts:
            - name: config
              mountPath: /etc/app/
      volumes:
        - name: config
          configMap:
            name: app-config

Now any change to the ConfigMap - either by directly editing the yaml file or via a changed template variable - will cause the annotation to change, triggering a rolling update of all relevant pods.

direnv & pass

Users of pass may have multiple different password stores on their machines. Assuming that kontemplate configuration exists somewhere on the filesystem per project, it is easy to use direnv to switch to the correct PASSWORD_STORE_DIR variable when entering the folder.