A deployment project is collection of deployment items and sub-deployments. Deployment items are usually Kustomize deployments, but can also integrate Helm Charts.

Basic structure

The following visualization shows the basic structure of a deployment project. The entry point of every deployment project is the deployment.yaml file, which then includes further sub-deployments and kustomize deployments. It also provides some additional configuration required for multiple kluctl features to work as expected.

As can be seen, sub-deployments can include other sub-deployments, allowing you to structure the deployment project as you need.

Each level in this structure recursively adds tags to each deployed resources, allowing you to control precisely what is deployed in the future.

  -- project-dir/
   |-- deployment.yaml
   |-- .gitignore
   |-- kustomize-deployment1/
   |   |-- kustomization.yaml
   |   `-- resource.yaml
   |-- sub-deployment/
   |   |-- deployment.yaml
   |   |-- kustomize-deployment2/
   |   |   |-- resource1.yaml
   |   |   `-- ...
   |   |-- kustomize-deployment3/
   |   |   |-- kustomization.yaml
   |   |   |-- resource1.yaml
   |   |   |-- resource2.yaml
   |   |   |-- patch1.yaml
   |   |   `-- ...
   |   |-- kustomize-with-helm-deployment
   |   |   |-- charts/
   |   |   |   `-- ...
   |   |   |-- kustomization.yaml
   |   |   |-- helm-chart.yaml
   |   |   `-- helm-values.yaml
   |   `-- subsub-deployment/
   |       |-- deployment.yaml
   |       |-- ... kustomize deployments
   |       `-- ... subsubsub deployments
   `-- sub-deployment/
       `-- ...

Order of deployments

Deployments are done in parallel, meaning that there are usually no order guarantees. The only way to somehow control order, is by placing barriers between kustomize deployments. You should however not overuse barriers, as they negatively impact the speed of kluctl.

Plain Kustomize

It’s also possible to use Kluctl on plain Kustomize deployments. Simply run kluctl deploy from inside the folder of your kustomization.yaml. If you also don’t have a .kluctl.yaml, you can also work without targets.

Please note that pruning and deletion is not supported in this mode.