Deploy

When Skaffold deploys your application to Kubernetes, it (usually) goes through these steps:

• the Skaffold deployer renders the final Kubernetes manifests: Skaffold replaces untagged image names in the Kubernetes manifests with the final tagged image names. It also might go through the extra intermediate step of expanding templates (for helm) or calculating overlays (for kustomize).
• the Skaffold deployer deploys the final Kubernetes manifests to the cluster
• the Skaffold deployer performs status checks and waits for the deployed resources to stabilize.

Supported deployers

Skaffold supports the following tools for deploying applications:

• kubectl
• helm
• kustomize
• docker (does not deploy to Kubernetes: see documentation for more details)

Skaffold’s deploy configuration is set through the deploy section of the skaffold.yaml. See each deployer’s page for more information on how to configure them for use in Skaffold. It’s also possible to use a combination of multiple deployers in a single project.

For a detailed discussion on Skaffold configuration, see Skaffold Concepts and skaffold.yaml References.