"skaffold deploy" is not useful

[ahmetb]

I cannot figure out the use case for "skaffold deploy".

This command is not able to populate the image tags. Without that, all it's doing is corrupting the Deployments by deploying the tag-less images.

This command cannot use the result of "skaffold build" like this (as far as I know):

skaffold build > images.txt
skaffold deploy < images.txt

Without these functionality this command just appears like a kubectl apply that is not compatible with skaffold run to me.

Please consider either making "deploy" cmd work with "build" cmd or consider eliminating to avoid confusing users.

[dgageot]

I agree that this command is not working well.

[balopat]

The use case would be to use skaffold deploy as part of other orchestration tools, e.g. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/skaffold-tools-for-java or an IDE to call it. I think we should figure out the tagging situation with skaffold deploy.

[mxey]

See also #653

[cliveza]

Yeah, I just picked up on this too. I thought I could `

RELEASE=v1.0.0 skaffold build
RELEASE=v1.0.0 skaffold deploy

While the build command is able to build an image with the correct tag, using an environment variable and envTemplate, the deploy command just ignore this all together.

[r2d4]

I think the right fix for this is that skaffold deploy should also generate the tag through the git commit tagger (or env tagger).

[r2d4]

Eventually we might want to get rid of the "non-stable" taggers that rely on information from the build artifact itself

[rsanders]

Could skaffold build write the build artifact names to an output file that is also read by skaffold deploy? I see that it has support for outputting those, but it leaves the plumbing as an exercise for the user.

We are using skaffold in our CD pipeline, and we like having "non-stable" components like build ID in the docker image tag. We also prefer to have separate build -> test -> deploy stages.

[r2d4]

@rsanders yes, skaffold build already outputs the go template of the struct that deploy uses. Deploy should be able to read from that generated output

I imagine something like

skaffold build > build.out
# do some work
skaffold deploy --build-artifacts=build.out

or

skaffold build | skaffold deploy --build-artifacts -

or

skaffold build > build.out
# do some work
skaffold deploy --build-artifacts - < build.out

[balopat]

cc @tejal29