Monokle Desktop 1.3.0 — Cluster Compare

We’re super-excited to release version 1.3.0 of Monokle — our open source tool for managing Kubernetes manifests — with some truly exciting new functionality and requested features to make developers lives easier like:

• Cluster Compare
• Improved Validation logic and errors display
• Handling of multiple kubeconfig contexts
• Linux Installers/Packages
• Improved Kustomize Support
• and a whole lot more — take a look below!

(If you haven't heard of Monokle, check out our project on Github to get started and join our growing Discord community. )

Cluster Compare

The (truly awesome!) Cluster-Compare functionality provides you with an interactive UI to compare a set of local resources (either static or generated by Helm/Kustomize) to those in your cluster, allowing you to easily

• assess which resources that are different/missing
• diff each resource individually and/or apply them to your cluster

No more fumbling with manual/command-line approaches to understanding the impact your manifests will have on your cluster configuration when deployed — Monokle will give you that nice overview you have craved since your first helm-diff!

To give you a better idea of the workflow, here comes a short video showing you how it works:

Improved Validation Errors

As before Monokle automatically validates all loaded resources against their corresponding kubernetes schema and also checks the integrity of links/references between all resources.

The total number of errors is now shown at the top of the resource navigator — with a corresponding popup that shows a list of invalid resources.

Clicking a resource will automatically select and open it for editing — so you can easily find the cause of the error and hopefully fix it directly.

Notification Center

We’ve added a notification center that allows you to see all past notifications:

Kubeconfig Context Selection

If your specified kubeconfig file contains multiple contexts Monokle will detect those and allow you to select which one to use for cluster-related operations:

Linux Installers/Packages

We now provide a bunch of packages for various Linux distros:

Handling of optional references

Monokle now does not flag incorrect optional references as errors in resources:

In this screenshot you can see that the configMapKeyRef has optional set to true - resulting in no error for the invalid name reference (vs the one below which has optional set to false).

This behavior can be disabled in the Settings pane

resulting in errors shown for optional references also:

Improved Kustomize support

• Support kustomization files without kind/apiVersion
• Possibility to select which command to use for kustomize

Display unknown resource kinds in Navigator

Monokle previously didn’t show any resources which it didn’t recognize, now it shows these under a dedicated “Unknown” section at the bottom of the Navigator.

(The upcoming plugin-framework will allow you to provide custom validation/linking/editing services for resource kinds not handled natively by Monokle)

Lots of minor bug-fixes and improvements

• Support running Helm/Kustomize for files on windows shares
• Support for namespace-scoped object references
• A bunch of input and editor-related bug fixes
• A bunch of improvements to the underlying file watching/parsing logic for improved performance and stability
• Improved filter icon to show how many filters that are currently active
• Improved cluster icon to show if a valid kubeconfig context has been selected
• Improved parsing/handling of Kustomize patch files
• Updated a bunch of dependencies — most notably Electron to the latest 15.3.1 release.
• And a bunch more…

As always we’re super-excited about the release:

• Download the release from GitHub
• Check out the documentation
• Let us know what you think on our Discord Server

Thanks all!

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