Labels and Annotations

Labels and annotations are Kubernetes constructs for attaching arbitrary metadata as key-value pairs to resources. Often, they are used by third-party integrations to enhance the functionality of Kubernetes. For example, if you were using cert-manager to provision SSL certificates, you could add the cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer annotation to your ingress resources.

To allow you to take advantage of such integrations, Acorn supports specifying labels and annotations in your Acornfile. These will be applied to the core Kubernetes resources created by Acorn.

Labels and annotations can be defined as top-level elements in an Acornfile or on individual members of the following resources:

• containers
• jobs
• volumes
• secrets

To define labels or annotations that apply to all resources created for your app, add them as top-level elements:

labels: {
    key: "value"
}
annotations: {
    key: "value"
}

containers: {
    // ...
}

volumes: {
    // ..
}

To define labels or annotations that apply to a specific resource, add them to the desired resource:

containers:{
    frontend: {
        labels: {
            key: "value"
        }
        annotations: {
            key: "value"
        }
    }
    // ...
}

In the above examples, the core Kubernetes resources created for the acorn container called "frontend" will get the labels and annotations. This includes the deployment, pods, ingress, and services.

You can also specify labels and annotations from the CLI when launching an acorn via the run command. See here for more details.

note

If the Acorn installation has disabled user label and annotation propagation, then, except for the metadata scope, labels and annotations will be silently ignored.