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stefanprodan/kustomizer
An experimental package manager for distributing Kubernetes configuration as OCI artifacts.
Kustomizer is a CLI tool from Stefan Prodan (FluxCD maintainer) that treats Kubernetes manifests as OCI artifacts — push your kustomize configs to a container registry, pull and apply them with inventory tracking and garbage collection. It's for platform teams who want to version and distribute K8s configuration the same way they distribute container images, with Cosign signing and age encryption thrown in.
Server-side apply plus an inventory ConfigMap gives you proper drift detection and garbage collection without needing a full GitOps operator running in the cluster. The OCI-native approach is genuinely useful: you can tag, semver-filter, and diff manifest bundles exactly like container images, using credentials you already have. Age encryption for secrets in artifacts is a clean solution to the 'how do I ship sensitive config through a public registry' problem. The test suite covers the CLI commands end-to-end against a real registry, not mocks.
Archived/unmaintained since mid-2023 — Stefan moved this work into FluxCD's OCI source controller, so this is effectively a prototype that got absorbed upstream. With 303 stars and 16 forks, the community never formed, which means no third-party integrations and no one to pick up bugs. The inventory is stored in a ConfigMap, which means it's not namespaced cleanly and you can have drift between the ConfigMap state and actual cluster state if apply fails mid-way. No multi-cluster support — the inventory model assumes a single kubeconfig context.