Niklas Tech Blog

A colleague showed me this neat trick so I didn’t have to write the same information twice in a Ingress manifest file. I needed to map two hosts to the same path, and instead of duplicate the same information twice we can just reference the “http” section in the previous definition in the second host.

Example:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: my-ingress
  namespace: default
  annotations:
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
    - host: my-first.domain.se
      http: &http-paths
        paths:
          - path: /my-application
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: my-application-service
                port:
                  number: 8080
    - host: my-second.domain.se
      http: *http-paths

The trick here is to use the &-sign to mark a place in manifest that you want to reference. In this example I named the reference “&http-paths”. When we later define the second host (my-second.domain.se) we can just de-reference the reference with the *-sign, here show as “*http-paths”. This will “copy” the whole http section with path, service and port, from the first definition and “paste” it into the second host section.
In Kubernetes this will be de-referenced and look like I put the same information in both hosts

Tested on Tanzu Kubernetes v1.22