Use with Kustomize and Helm

Kubesplit reads from STDIN, so it drops straight into a pipeline behind any tool that renders a multidoc Kubernetes stream — most commonly kustomize and helm. This turns a single opaque render into a reviewable tree of one-resource-per-file.

Pass - (or nothing) as the input and let kubesplit read the piped stream; give it an output directory with -o/--output.

With Kustomize

kustomize build overlays/prod | kubesplit --no-quotes-preserved --input - --output generated/prod

Or with kubectl's built-in kustomize:

kubectl kustomize overlays/prod | kubesplit -q -i - -o generated/prod

With Helm

helm template my-release my-chart \
  --namespace target-ns \
  --values config.yml \
| kubesplit --no-quotes-preserved --input - --output generated/prod

Keep the output directory in sync

When you re-render after a change, add -c/--clean-output-dir so that files for removed resources don't linger:

kustomize build overlays/prod | kubesplit -q -c -i - -o generated/prod

Warning

--clean-output-dir recursively deletes the output directory before writing. Point it only at a directory dedicated to generated output.

Next steps

• Tune the emitted YAML in Tune the YAML formatting.
• Understand the resource detection and ordering in How kubesplit works.
• Read why teams split their renders (reviewable diffs, apply order, consistent formatting) in Ecosystem.