skaffold deploy should not automatically re-create resources

[mxey]

Expected behavior

skaffold deploy when encountering an immutable field should fail with an error.
(skaffold dev can continue to automatically re-create)

Actual behavior

skaffold deploy deletes and recreates the resource automatically, because it always uses kubectl apply --force. This leads to downtime of workloads.

Information

• Skaffold version: v0.20.0
• Operating system: macOS 10.14.2 (18C54)
• Contents of skaffold.yaml:

apiVersion: skaffold/v1beta2
kind: Config
deploy:
  kubectl:
    manifests:
      - deployment.yaml

• Contents of deployment.yaml:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: nginx
          image: nginx:1.7.9
          ports:
            - containerPort: 80

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. skaffold deploy
2. Change app: nginx in deployment.yaml to app: nginx2 (the selectors for Deployment are immutable)
3. skaffold deploy

[corneliusweig]

IMHO this should best be solved by a new flag to run/deploy, because some will want to force a successful deployment, even if it means to re-create some resources. For example, one could add a flag force-deployment with the following defaults for skaffold sub-commands:

command	force-deployment default	hidden
dev	true	true
run	false	false
deploy	false	false

[balopat]

Hi, thanks for opening this issue!
I'm okay with a new flag, say --force.
PR's are welcome ;)

[corneliusweig]

I'll look into this :)