Kustomize Output

When you run kustomize build, it compiles all resource manifests along with their specified transformations and prints them to stdout. However, this command alone does not apply these configurations to your Kubernetes cluster. If you immediately check your cluster with:

kubectl get pods
kubectl get deployments
kubectl get services

you will see that no resources have been created yet.

Applying Resources

There are two common ways to apply the manifests generated by Kustomize:

1. Piping the output into kubectl apply:

   kustomize build k8s/ | kubectl apply -f -
   

   Example output:

   service/nginx-loadbalancer-service created
   deployment.apps/nginx-deployment created
   

2. Using kubectl’s native Kustomize support with the -k flag:

   kubectl apply -k k8s/
   

   Example output:

   service/nginx-loadbalancer-service created
   deployment.apps/nginx-deployment created
   

Command Reference Table

Deleting Resources

To remove the same set of resources you applied, replace apply with delete in either approach:

1. Piping into kubectl delete:

   kustomize build k8s/ | kubectl delete -f -
   

   Example output:

   service "nginx-loadbalancer-service" deleted
   deployment.apps "nginx-deployment" deleted
   

2. Using kubectl delete -k:

   kubectl delete -k k8s/
   

   Example output:

   service "nginx-loadbalancer-service" deleted
   deployment.apps "nginx-deployment" deleted
   

Further Reading

• Kustomize Documentation
• kubectl apply Overview
• kubectl delete Overview