Picture of the Author

After recently working on some k8's deployments we came across this obscure error when attempting to delete multiple unneeded Secrets generated by Helm.

Error: trouble configuring builtin PatchTransformer with config: `
path: my_patch.yaml
target:
  kind: ServiceAccount
...
`: unable to parse SM or JSON patch from [my_patch.yaml]
Error: trouble configuring builtin PatchTransformer with config: `
path: my_patch.yaml
target:
  kind: ServiceAccount
...
`: unable to parse SM or JSON patch from [my_patch.yaml]

Doing some investigation it was discovered that the pretty innocuous patch in question:

- patch: |
    \$patch: delete
    kind: ServiceAccount
    metadata:
      namespace: my-namespace
  target:
    kind: Secret
- patch: |
    \$patch: delete
    kind: ServiceAccount
    metadata:
      namespace: my-namespace
  target:
    kind: Secret

was missing a mandatory namename field. I mean, why would you need a namename? It's just a patch, right? Well, apparently not. And turns out the value can be anything you want, so long as it's there...

- patch: |
    \$patch: delete
    kind: ServiceAccount
    metadata:
      name: this-can-be-anything
      namespace: my-namespace
  target:
    kind: Secret
- patch: |
    \$patch: delete
    kind: ServiceAccount
    metadata:
      name: this-can-be-anything
      namespace: my-namespace
  target:
    kind: Secret