Rename deployment in Kubernetes

Question

If I do kubectl get deployments, I get:

$ kubectl get deployments
NAME                  DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
analytics-rethinkdb   1         1         1            1           18h
frontend              1         1         1            1           6h
queue                 1         1         1            1           6h

Is it possible to rename the deployment to rethinkdb? I have tried googling kubectl edit analytics-rethinkdb and changing the name in the yaml, but that results in an error:

$ kubectl edit deployments/analytics-rethinkdb
error: metadata.name should not be changed

I realize I can just kubectl delete deployments/analytics-rethinkdb and then do kubectl run analytics --image=rethinkdb --command -- rethinkdb etc etc but I feel like it should be possible to simply rename it, no?

Solution 1

Object names are immutable in Kubernetes. If you want to change a name, you can export/edit/recreate with a different name

Solution 2

As others mentioned, kubernetes objects names are immutable, so technically rename is not possible.

A hacking approach to emulate some similar behavior would be to delete an object and create it with a different name. That is a bit dangerous as some conflicts can happen depending on your object. A command line approach could look like this:

    kubectl get deployment analytics-rethinkdb -o json \
        | jq '.metadata.name = "rethinkdb"' \
        | kubectl apply -f - && \
    kubectl delete deployment analytics-rethinkdb

Comments

[Erik Rothoff]

As a total newbie to kubernetes: why is this? What is in the name that needs to be so immutable? Thanks!

[Tiger93]

The name is the identity of the object. An object with a different name is a different object. One goal of the API is idempotent operations. If a create operation encounters a network error, it should be able to be retried and either get an AlreadyExists error (if the previous try actually succeeded server side) or the create would work as intended. If an object could have been renamed in the meantime, it's not clear how the subsequent create request should behave.