ApiObject

An ApiObject is a construct that represents an entry in a Kubernetes manifest (level 0). In most cases, you won’t use ApiObject directly but rather use classes that are imported through cdk8s import and which extend this base class.

By default, when you import API objects from k8s, all class names will all be prefixed with Kube to differentiate them from the high-level APIs in cdk8s+. It is possible to customize the prefix by providing a string value to the --class-prefix flag, or by passing --no-class-prefix. (Note: if no prefix is used for k8s resources, this may lead to conflicts - see https://github.com/cdk8s-team/cdk8s/issues/140).

Resource Names

By default, cdk8s will autogenerate a name for every resource when it is instantiated. The name is created from the path of the construct, and suffixed with a hash of that path.

For example, the following code:

import { App, Chart } from 'cdk8s';
import * as kplus from 'cdk8s-plus-25';

const app = new App();
const chart = new MyChart(app, 'my-chart');

new kplus.Deployment(chart, 'deployment', {
  containers: [{ image: 'nginx' }]
});

app.synth();

generates a Deployment with the name: my-chart-deployment-c8c354dd. Where my-chart is the id of the Chart, deployment is the id of the Deployment, and c8c354dd is the hash suffix.

You can programmatically access the name of any resource in a cdk8s app by accessing the .name property of a resource. For example:

const deployment = new kplus.Deployment(chart, 'deployment', {
  containers: [{ image: 'nginx' }]
});
const deploymentName = deployment.name;

To remove hashes from resource names, you can set the disableResourceNameHashes property to true:

...
const chart = new MyChart(app, 'my-chart', {
    disableResourceNameHashes: true,
});
...

Which would similarly generate a Deployment with the name: my-chart-deployment. Note that disabling hashes introduces the possibility of name clashes. For example, the following code:

// think of this as a custom construct
const c = new Construct(this, 'Construct');

new kplus.Deployment(c, 'Deployment', {
  containers: [{ image: 'image' }]
});

new kplus.Deployment(this, 'Construct-Deployment', {
  containers: [{ image: 'image' }]
})

will produce two deployments with the same name: chart-construct-deployment. This happens because cdk8s uses a hyphen (-) as the delimiter between elements in the path, so if the id of your construct also contains a hyphen (-), a collision can occur. In addition, you can explicitly set a name for every resource by using the metadata.name property:

new kplus.Deployment(c, 'Deployment', {
  metadata: {
    name: 'my-deployment'
  },
  ...
});