Relation to kustomize or ship?

[tookko]

What's mortar's relation to kustomize in upstream or ship from replicatedhq? Is it purely an alternative approach, or do you see the tools interacting with each other?

Our use case involves doing overlays to customize existing helm charts in a managed way. Unfortunately the helm charts are using a lot of lifecycle hooks (both standard and custom) so just piping e.g. helm template into kustomize is not working very well.

[jnummelin]

kustomize really only allows you to use overlays to customize the deployments e.g. per environment. I haven't looked at ship really at all, so cannot really comment on the relation to that. With a super quick look at the docs, "overlays" seems to be the chosen approach to customization there too.

What Mortar enables is basically overlays, templating with ERB and the overall management of complex apps as one "shot". Something similar you can do with Helm. But not adding all the complexity that comes with Helm. :) And not to mention

Essentially Mortar "just" processes the templates and overlays and outputs the resulting resources into k8s api. There are flags to just output to stdout so technically it should be possible to pipe it with other tools.

There was a PR to integrate Mortar with skaffold but that never got accepted upstream.