Auto-applying Manifests

A common use case after bringing up a new cluster is applying manifests for bootstrapping a management agent like the Open Cluster Management's klusterlet or for starting up services when running disconnected.

MicroShift leverages kustomize for Kubernetes-native templating and declarative management of resource objects. Upon start-up, it searches /etc/microshift/manifests, /usr/lib/microshift/manifests and ${DATADIR}/manifests (which defaults to /var/lib/microshift/manifests) for a kustomization.yaml file. If it finds one, it automatically runs kubectl apply -k to that kustomization`

Example:

cat <<EOF >/etc/microshift/manifests/nginx.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  replicas: 2
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: NGINX_IMAGE
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
EOF

cat <<EOF >/etc/microshift/manifests/kustomization.yaml
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

resources:
  - nginx.yaml
images:
  - name: NGINX_IMAGE
    newName: nginx:1.21
EOF

The reason for providing multiple directories is to allow a flexible method to manage MicroShift workloads.

The list of manifest locations can be customized via configuration using the manifests section (see here) or via the MICROSHIFT_MANIFESTS environment variable as comma separated directories.