nautikos 0.1.1

A CD tool for updating image tags in Kubernetes manifests

Nautikos

Nautikos is a CLI tool for updating image tags in Kubernetes manifests, as part of a GitOps CI/CD process.

Rationale

In a GitOps CI/CD process, a deployment repo contains Kubernetes manifests for multiple services and environments, that are tracked by a tool like Argo-CD or Flux. When a new image of an application is created, you want the tags for that image to be updated in the manifests. Doing this manually is error prone. Having to write logic in every repo or pipeline to perform this is tedious.

This is where Nautikos comes in.

Installation

pip install nautikos

Basic usage

Nautikos is configured through a YAML-file (./nautikos.yaml), that specifies where the manifests for the different images and environments can be found:

environments: 
# An environment is basically a collection of manifests that you want to 
# update simultaneously. 
- name: prod 
  manifests: 
  - path: path/to/prod-env-1-file.yaml  # Path relative to configuration file
    type: kubernetes  # Type can be 'kubernetes', 'kustomize' or 'helm'
  - path: path/to/prod-env-2-file.yaml 
    type: kustomize
    repositories:  # Optional specification of repositories to be modified for more granular control
      - repository-b
      - repository-c
- name: dev
  manifests: 
  - path: path/to/dev-env-file.yaml
    type: helm

Next, you can run Nautikos to update the image tags of specific images in different environments.

nautikos --env prod repository-a 1.2.3  # Updates all occurences of the image `repository-a` to `1.2.3` in `prod-env-1-file.yaml`
nautikos --env prod repository-b 1.2.3  # Updates all occurences of the image `repository-b` to `1.2.3` in `prod-env-1-file.yaml` and `prod-env-1-file.yaml`
nautikos --env dev repository-c dev-1.2.3  # Updates all occurences of the image `repository-c` to `dev-1.2.3` in `dev-env-file.yaml`

Supported tools

The tool works with standard Kubernetes manifests, Kustomize, and Helm. Each have their own format for defining image tags.

# Kubernetes manifests
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: some-repository:tag

# Kustomize
images: 
- name: some-repository
  newTag: tag 

# Helm 
image: 
- repository: some-repository 
  tag: tag 

Advanced usage

Nautikos takes several options:

• --dry-run: prints the lines that would be modified, but doesn't edit in place
• --config config-file.yaml: path to config YAML, default is ./nautikos.yaml

Alternatives

There are basically three alternatives to do the same thing:

• Update manifests manually - of course this works, but this is not really proper CD
• Write your own bash scripts in a pipeline using a tool like sed - This works, but having to write this logic for every project is tedious.
• Use a tool like Argo-CD Image updater - very nice, but a bit heavy-weight, not very actively developed, and doesn't seem to support Azure Container Registry.

Notes

Multiple YAML docs in one file is not yet supported.

Dependencies

• typer - for creating a CLI
• ruamel.yaml - for handling YAML files while maintaining ordering and comments