Kube-context activation

When interacting with a Kubernetes cluster, just like any other Kubernetes-native tool, Skaffold requires a valid Kubernetes context to be configured. The selected kube-context determines the Kubernetes cluster, the Kubernetes user, and the default namespace. By default, Skaffold uses the current kube-context from your kube-config file.

You can override this default one of two ways:

1. --kube-context flag

   skaffold dev --kube-context <myrepo>

2. Specify deploy.kubeContext configuration in skaffold.yaml

   deploy:
     kubeContext: minikube

The CLI flag always takes precedence over the config field in the skaffold.yaml.

Kube-context activation and Skaffold profiles

The kube-context has a double role for Skaffold profiles:

1. A Skaffold profile may be auto-activated by the current kube-context (via profiles.activation.kubeContext).

2. A Skaffold profile may change the kube-context (via profiles.deploy.kubeContext).

Skaffold ensures that these two roles are not conflicting. To that end, profile activation is done with the original kube-context. If any profile is auto-activated by a matching kube-context, the resulting kube-context must remain unchanged. This rule prevents profile-specific settings for one context to be deployed into a different context.

For example, given the following profiles:

profiles:
  - name: profile-1
    deploy:
      kubeContext: docker-for-desktop

  - name: profile-2
    activation:
      - kubeContext: minikube

It is illegal to activate both profiles here, because profile-2 has an activation by kube-context and profile-1 changes the effective kube-context. This happens for

• skaffold run -p profile-1,profile-2
• skaffold run -p profile-1 if the current kube-context is minikube

Limitations

It is not possible to change the kube-context of a running skaffold dev session. To pick up the changes to kubeContext, you will need to quit and re-run skaffold dev.